The Hollywood Ten (1950)

The Hollywood Ten (1950) is a documentary short from the heart of the film noir era dealing with the heart of the film noir issue as it deals HUAC-style with the predictive enforced persecution of American citizens in the form of ten Hollywood working men who were found in contempt of the House Un American Committee in the early hey day of American political persecution, indeed back in the days when it meant so much more, to so many more. 

This was not a social media event, but prefigures some of our crazed modern censoring in a few material manners.

A few words on what it is all about can be ventured in a tentative and non-language-model-generated essay entitled: Spectacle, Subpoenas, and Specters: The Hollywood Ten and the Performance of Power. The language models have proved useless in dealing with the subject of The Ten, so here is some great human writing, perhaps scrappy as humans can be, but impassioned and factual, just what we need.

Start it off like this: At precisely 10:30 a.m. on Monday, October 20, 1947, the Caucus Room of the Old House Office Building in Washington, D.C., transformed into a theatrical crucible. The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) launched its first full-scale investigation into the alleged subversion of the American film industry by Communist ideology. 

Awesome and fearsome. Here we are with the blueprint for everything, the birth of the Twenty First Century. Imagine what these men would have done if they had access to social media and large language models. Communism is not bad. Witch hunting is bad.

This was a moment designed for the lens: the cameras whirred, flashbulbs burst, and the performative machinery of power revealed itself. Essential noir in the real. The hearings closed officially on October 30, but Chairman J. Parnell Thomas, in a rhetorical flourish, declared the investigation merely "the first phase" of a broader purge. Where are we today?

The ultimate in Desk To Camera film noir from The Hollywood Ten (1950)

From a procedural standpoint, the hearings were ineptly choreographed. Of the forty-three subpoenaed individuals, only thirty-nine testified, and ten were cited for contempt for refusing to answer HUAC’s two-pronged loyalty test: guild membership and political affiliation. 

The infamous “Hollywood Ten” were thus born—not through ideological coherence or collective strategy, but through the imposition of a mythologizing label that elided individuality in favor of symbolic utility.

The origins of the October spectacle trace back to the ideological skirmishes of the 1930s. The rise of the Screen Writers Guild (SWG), seen by reactionaries as a Trojan horse for leftist infiltration, marked the consolidation of organized labor in Hollywood—an intolerable prospect for the right. The left! The right! They still hate Communists across The States.

The foundation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944, with James K. McGuinness, Sam Wood, and Walt Disney among its key figures, ensured that HUAC would never want for “friendly” witnesses willing to furnish names and reinforce paranoia.

May 1947’s closed hearings at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles were a preview of the October inquisition. Leaks abounded. Testimonies were strategically reported in national press. Names were aired with aplomb: Dalton Trumbo, Clifford Odets, even Lela Rogers, mother of Ginger, threw names into the fire. These performances provided HUAC with its script for October. The politics of publicity ensured that by the time the subpoenas went out, Hollywood already knew who was on trial.

The cast of characters was bifurcated into "friendly" and "unfriendly" witnesses, terms coined by Thomas and popularized by the Hollywood Reporter. The "Unfriendly Nineteen" included a peculiar cohort: eleven screenwriters, three directors, two writer-directors, one playwright (Bertolt Brecht), one producer, and one actor (Larry Parks). Notably, they were all men—despite HUAC’s prior willingness to interrogate women like Lela Rogers and Ayn Rand. The exclusions were glaring. Lillian Hellman and Karen Morley had to wait until 1952 for their summons.

The rationale for selection remains speculative. That the majority had Communist affiliations (past or present), that they were writers, that they had been sympathetic to the Soviet Union—these are weak justifications, rendered laughable by HUAC’s inconsistency. Howard Koch, not a Communist, was called merely for writing Mission to Moscow, a state-sanctioned propaganda film. Meanwhile, Casey Robinson, author of the equally pro-Soviet Days of Glory, remained untouched—likely because he belonged to the Motion Picture Alliance.

The hearings' dramaturgy was chaotic. Subpoenaed "unfriendly" witnesses were initially scheduled for October 23, yet were later pushed to the week of the 27th without clear explanation. HUAC’s ignorance of even basic logistics exposed its hollowness as a legal instrument; it operated instead as political theater.

The sequencing of witnesses followed no apparent logic. John Howard Lawson, not Albert Maltz (who had the thickest file), was called first. Ring Lardner, Jr., scheduled for the 29th, missed his cue because he had not been informed. Adrian Scott, afflicted with laryngitis, forced Edward Dmytryk to testify solo. Meanwhile, Emmet Lavery, a Catholic dramatist whose Communist credentials were fabricated through innuendo, was parachuted in with little context.

The logic of guilt-by-association reached its apex with Brecht, whose mere acquaintance with composer Hanns Eisler implicated him. Yet Brecht disarmed the committee by answering the $64 question with wry, Teutonic precision: he had never been a member of any Communist Party. Having denied affiliation, he exited with the committee’s thanks—and the country’s airspace.

The procedural farce climaxed with Lester Cole, the tenth and final contempt citation. HUAC had secured its sacrificial decagon. It mattered little that some of the Unfriendly Nineteen were never called. The number ten was too neat to resist. The narrative was already written.

The blacklist followed swiftly. On November 25, the Waldorf Statement was issued: the Ten were to be dismissed, uncompensated, and unemployable unless they recanted. By December 5, they were indicted for contempt. By 1950, they were imprisoned.

The Hollywood Ten were never a collective in the political or aesthetic sense. They did not collaborate, they did not conspire, they did not even agree on legal strategy. Their unity was imposed by the state. Had the hearings continued, had Waldo Salt testified, had Scott not been ill, the Hollywood Eleven or Twelve might now be the subject of our discourse. The numerical designation was as arbitrary as it was convenient.

Crucially, the Ten chose the First Amendment over the Fifth. This decision—more principled than strategic—gave them moral authority but no legal protection. Their refusal to answer stemmed not from guilt but from a commitment to civil liberty. HUAC’s conflation of union membership with subversion, of party affiliation with treason, was a grotesque distortion of constitutional principles.

The hearings were neither fact-finding nor protective. They were retaliatory, incoherent, and self-aggrandizing. Chairman Thomas, convicted of embezzlement and imprisoned alongside some of the Ten, became a tragicomic emblem of the era’s hypocrisy. His committee—uninformed, overreaching, and politically motivated—sought not justice but spectacle.

And yet, history remembers the Hollywood Ten not for their films, but for their defiance. Billy Wilder’s quip that only two of the Ten had talent has calcified into received wisdom, but remains untested. Their true legacy lies not in their silence but in their craft, which has been obscured by the very performance HUAC staged.

What HUAC failed to comprehend was that the screen is not merely a medium of propaganda but of expression. The very artists it sought to silence were those most attuned to the contradictions of American democracy. They paid the price not for what they wrote, but for what they believed—or were perceived to believe.

Thomas J. Parnell is the villain in the noir docu-classic The Hollywood Ten (1950)

The Hollywood Ten were not martyrs, nor were they saints. They were individuals caught in a convergence of ideology, fear, and performance. Their story, far from resolved, continues to haunt the American imagination—not as a cautionary tale of radicalism, but as a lesson in the cost of conformity masquerading as patriotism.

The Ten were Men of course, but that aside, let's not deride the days which sought to have their hides and always tell their story, for it is our story and the story of The Noircades. We should like you to meet them.

Albert Maltz

Albert Maltz, born in Brooklyn in 1908, emerged as a gifted writer and social critic at an early age. After completing his studies at Columbia University and the Yale School of Drama, Maltz became known for his politically charged plays. His 1932 play Merry Go Round, which exposed the injustice of a wrongly convicted busboy, garnered critical attention and was eventually adapted into a film.

Maltz’s writing was defined by its keen social consciousness, with his short stories and novels addressing issues such as unemployment and labor struggles. His 1938 short story “The Happiest Man on Earth,” which depicted the impact of the Great Depression, won the prestigious O. Henry Award. Like Lawson and Ornitz, Maltz’s political activism led him to join the Communist Party, though his primary focus remained on his writing. His work in Hollywood included notable contributions to iconic films such as Casablanca (uncredited) and Pride of the Marines (1945), which earned him an Oscar nomination.

Maltz’s defiance of HUAC was as resolute as that of his colleagues. During his hearing, he invoked the legacy of American patriots like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, but his eloquence did little to shield him from punishment. Maltz was fined $1,000 and sentenced to 12 months in prison. After his release, he moved to Mexico and continued writing, though he often had to work under pseudonyms due to the blacklist. 

One of his most significant post-blacklist achievements was his contribution to the screenplay for Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), for which he finally received full credit. Maltz remained committed to his beliefs, warning against complacency even as the Hollywood Ten were gradually rehabilitated in the public eye. He died in 1985, a figure whose literary and cinematic legacy continued to reflect his deep commitment to justice.

*

Lester Cole

LESTER COLE was the dramatist of class conflict, the proletarian plot mechanic, and perhaps the most inveterately cinematic of the Hollywood Ten. 

Where SAMUEL ORNITZ elevated fable to fiction and JOHN HOWARD LAWSON sculpted dialectic into drama, COLE mastered the hard arc of screen structure—an artisan of second acts and anticlimaxes, always ready to redistribute justice through narrative geometry.

Born into Socialist tradition and nourished on Polish dissent, COLE entered Hollywood in 1932, joining a chorus of new radicals who believed film could mean something, but who rarely agreed on what. While HOLLYWOOD RED—his memoir—remains a suspect monument to self-justification, it is invaluable for understanding how a high school dropout became the go-to craftsman for stories about convicts, sandhogs, social rot, and redemption.

His earliest credit, a grim slice of fatalist irony in If I Had a Million (1932), set the tone: a man receives fortune but not freedom. The "Death Cell Episode" was rewritten multiple times—originally overblown, ultimately austere. That paring down became his signature. Throughout the 1930s, COLE avoided genre glamour and prestige pieces; his domain was the B-unit, his aesthetic proletarian, his moral compass Socialist. Universal, Republic, and Paramount employed him not because he was subtle, but because he was efficient, and he believed in what he wrote.

His work at Fox—Charlie Chan’s Greatest Case, Sleepers East, Under Pressure—was interspersed with coarse melodrama, but these were always populated with working-class figures, with hookers and boxers and parolees. These people, as COLE understood, did not have arcs—they had interruptions. His writing insisted on the centrality of the oppressed without fetishizing their suffering. In Under Pressure (1935), sandhogs become mythic laborers; dialogue and titles land with socialist thud and populist punch. Even love interests are industrially hardened—reporters, not romantics.

By the mid-1930s, Republic Pictures became his new studio, and if it was a downgrade in prestige, it offered him ideological oxygen. Here, he orchestrated antifascist parables (The President’s Mystery), proletarian comedies (Hitch Hike Lady), and collaborations with NATHANAEL WEST and SAMUEL ORNITZ. The Affairs of Cappy Ricks (1937) is a bizarrely utopian castaway satire, in which capitalism is shipwrecked and manual labor moralized. The President’s Mystery is more openly Socialist—a legal thriller turned cooperativist fantasia. Cole’s idealism was unrestrained; it could also be naïve. But no one could accuse him of insincerity.

At Universal, he became a script doctor with a conscience. The Man in Blue, Secrets of a Nurse, The Jury’s Secret—these were procedural morality plays, "wrong man" yarns, low-budget existentialists in three acts. He didn't invent the formula, but he refined it. Occasionally, he transcended it. Sinners in Paradise (1938) should have been pulp; instead, it’s a makeshift commune with Social Darwinism replaced by Socialist cooperation. Desert-island films rarely double as economic critiques.

In The House of the Seven Gables (1940), COLE dared to radicalize NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, reinterpreting antebellum malaise as proto-capitalist crime. Abolitionists are inserted. Slave traders are condemned. The Pyncheons become industrial villains, and Maule’s vengeance is that of the dispossessed, not the damned. It is not Hawthorne, but it is not heresy either. Cole made the Gothic modern.

At Paramount, he briefly brushed against horror with Among the Living (1941), which began as crypto-leftist psychodrama and ended as tame noir. His critique of fascism—hidden in trauma, twinship, and psychosexual repression—was surgically removed by the studio. When he re-emerged, it was with Pacific Blackout (1942) and Night Plane from Chungking (1942), which pushed antifascism to pulp absurdity. Japanese agents infiltrate Dutch clergy. War crimes are avenged through snarling monologues. Nuance was never the goal; clarity was.

His adaptation of Stefan Heym’s Hostages proved more difficult. Cole struggled to balance melodrama with martyrdom. Revision after revision—Lidice, partisans, charred ruins—was softened or cut entirely. Still, the bones remained. There was conviction in the framework.

But it is None Shall Escape (1944) that stands as his wartime epitaph. Anticipating Nuremberg before the trials were even conceived, the film is a somber morality tale where memory indicts and the voice of the oppressed—rendered through a rabbi's call to resistance—becomes elegy. The now-mythologized speech, often misattributed or embellished, is stark and powerful. Here, COLE didn't just write history—he foretold it.

His final peak was The Romance of Rosy Ridge (1947), a lyrical postbellum allegory set in Missouri but aimed at McCarthyite America. Beneath its dialect charm lies a ruthless metaphor: peace must be chosen, not presumed. Divisions linger. Hatreds must be named. COLE—ever the polemicist—knew reconciliation required reckoning. His teacher protagonist, a soft-spoken Yankee, is a stand-in for all well-meaning radicals who must tread softly in hostile soil.

Then came the subpoena. ROBERT TAYLOR, once a fan, became a friendly witness. LOUIS B. MAYER, once a patron, withdrew support. The Waldorf Statement ended it all. Unlike DALTON TRUMBO or RING LARDNER, JR., COLE never returned. The blacklist consumed his career whole.

His uncredited work continued—Born Free as Gerald L.C. Copley, Chain Lightning under another name—but the industry he helped shape refused to acknowledge him. Hollywood had room for radicals who repented. COLE never did.

In his final decades, he became a teacher. At San Francisco State University, his students wore "I ♥ Lester" shirts. To them, he was not a pariah but a prophet. He died a Stalinist, but not a cynic. His belief in art's ethical duty never dimmed. Politics gave him purpose; screenwriting gave him voice.

LESTER COLE never quite achieved cinematic greatness. But within the machinery of genre and studio, he embedded conscience. He made structure sing of struggle. And for a man who was never forgiven, he left behind a body of work that refuses to forget.

Lester Cole Wikipedia

*

Edward Dmytryk

There are lives which, once disinterred from the pieties of history and reanimated with the electric pulse of context, cease to resemble mere biographies. They emerge as indictments, meditations, and at times—tragic symphonies. Edward Dmytryk’s is one such life: an uneasy parable of expedience and conviction, staged not in abstract moral space, but in the pressure-cooker of twentieth-century Hollywood, where celluloid was both canvas and noose. 

Director, cutter, exile, apostate, and craftsman—Dmytryk’s career is a palimpsest, overwritten by compromise yet never quite effacing the radical ink beneath. Unlike his comrade-in-art Adrian Scott, who chose silence and exile, Dmytryk recanted. And in so doing, preserved a career. At what cost? That question trails him still, like a shadow on a noir-lit wall.

Born to Ukrainian immigrants in British Columbia in 1908 and raised amid hardship, Dmytryk was not destined for the salons of leftist idealism. He was, from the beginning, a technician—a man of splice and cut, apprenticed in the viscera of cinema. By age twenty-eight, he had clawed his way from messenger boy to director, having logged over a decade in editing rooms where film was assembled not by theory but by razors and instinct. His early work, largely B-grade melodramas and thrillers, bore the muscular hallmarks of that training: economy, momentum, and a grim fidelity to genre. Yet even in these early studio exercises—The Devil Commands (1941), Confessions of Boston Blackie (1941)—one detects a director conversant in chiaroscuro, composition, and moral velocity.

It was at RKO, under the left-leaning auspices of Adrian Scott, that Dmytryk found his defining aesthetic: noir not as style, but as worldview. Murder, My Sweet (1944), adapted from Raymond Chandler, was not just a genre piece but a noir Rosetta stone, encoded with every Dmytryk signature: the blindfolded hero, the doppelgänger femme, the syncopated narration. Crossfire (1947), again with Scott and screenwriter John Paxton, detonated with political intent. 

Adapted from Richard Brooks’s The Brick Foxhole, Scott and Paxton transfigured its homophobic murder into anti-Semitic hate crime. Dmytryk’s camera, all slatted shadows and accusatory angles, did the rest. Crossfire was a film that accused America of housing the very fascism it had gone abroad to defeat.

For this, Dmytryk paid. He was fired from RKO alongside Scott in November 1947 and called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as one of the Hollywood Ten. He refused. And was jailed. But unlike Scott, who refused to speak and lost everything, Dmytryk reversed course. 

In April 1951, he returned to testify, named names, and secured his return to the director’s chair. He had decided, as he told Ring Lardner Jr., that “I have to work.” In this phrase lies the hinge of his life—the calculus of principle versus survival, of silence versus speech.

This recantation, though reviled by many former allies, makes Dmytryk’s story less one of betrayal than of dissonance. For he did not return to fluff or penitential patriotism. His films post-blacklist remain dark, often tormented. The Sniper (1952) explores misogyny with clinical horror; The Juggler (1953), starring Kirk Douglas as a Holocaust survivor adrift in Israel, veers toward neurosis and trauma. 

The Caine Mutiny (1954), Dmytryk’s most commercially successful post-blacklist film, reveals his ambivalence about authority and madness—its infamous strawberry monologue less a descent into caricature than a mirror held to paranoia itself.

Stylistically, Dmytryk remained a purist. He eschewed ostentation, favoring long shots and precise framing over montage. His editing roots lent him a clarity rare among studio directors; scenes unfolded with the inevitability of mechanical process. Yet within this machinery, he embedded ambiguity. In Mirage (1965), a noir of memory and corporate dread, and in The Left Hand of God (1955), where Humphrey Bogart impersonates a priest in civil war China, faith and deception walk side by side. 

Even The End of the Affair (1955), adapted from Graham Greene, lets belief flicker in the chiaroscuro of adultery and grief.

And yet, something had changed. Dmytryk no longer made films of resistance. He made films of aftermath, of fracture, of half-redemptions. The sharp political clarity of Crossfire gave way to the tangled ambivalence of Raintree County (1957) and the disillusioned violence of Alvarez Kelly (1966), in which William Holden’s opportunistic cattleman navigates Civil War profiteering with anti-heroic swagger. 

Even his late-period entries—Walk on the Wild Side (1962), Shalako (1968), and the grotesquely operatic Bluebeard (1972)—suggest a director caught between pulp, parable, and parody. Gone was the firebrand. In his place: a survivor, bemused by the ruins.

It is tempting, perhaps too tempting, to read Dmytryk’s recantation as the defining turn in his life. But his art, while less ideologically legible than Scott’s, is equally fraught—dense with moral ambivalence and encoded trauma. His memoirs (It’s a Hell of a Life but Not a Bad Living and Odd Man Out) reveal a man keenly aware of contradictions: of how he betrayed some friends to remain among others, of how HUAC demanded not just names but narratives. He gave them both.

Still, in interviews, he claimed that the Party had betrayed art before the State had betrayed artists. He alleged coercion, ideological dogma, and aesthetic meddling. Perhaps this, too, was rationalization. But in Give Us This Day (1949), shot in exile, one sees what Dmytryk might have become: a neorealist, an anti-capitalist. 

The film, adapted from Pietro di Donato, depicts bricklayers in Depression-era Brooklyn with uncommon tenderness and fury. It was his purest leftist film. And it was buried. Its failure taught him the lesson Scott refused to learn: that conviction without commerce is martyrdom.

What do we make, then, of Edward Dmytryk? He was no saint. Nor quite a villain. He named names but never made propaganda. He survived, not by surrendering his art, but by redirecting it inward. His films, post-1951, are case studies in moral compromise, not celebrations of it. He is the noir director par excellence because he lived its contours: the wrong turn, the desperate deal, the mirror too cracked to provide absolution.

In one of his final films, The Human Factor (1975), an American vigilante tracks down terrorists who murdered his family. The film, cold and clinical, ends not in justice but in a grocery store shootout—banal, brutal, empty. It is a bleak coda. But also a mirror. By then, Dmytryk had long ceased to believe in catharsis. Only in continuity.

He died in 1999. At peace, perhaps. Or perhaps still editing, mentally, the final reel. One thing is certain: Edward Dmytryk chose work over witness. But in his best films, he remained—obliquely, uneasily—a witness still.

A decent man? Perhaps. A dangerous one? In his own way. Dangerous, that is, to those who would demand purity in the midst of wreckage. Edward Dmytryk refused purity. And for it, was spared. And stained.

*

Ring Lardner Jr.

Ring Lardner, Jr. emerges less as a conventional Hollywood craftsman than as a satirical paladin, wielding aphorism like a rapier, laughter as a form of dissent. The son of the eponymous American humorist, Ring Lardner, Sr., he inherited not merely his father’s name but also a caustic wit, sharpened on the whetstone of radical politics and cultural incredulity. 

Ring Lardner, Jr., born into a family of writers, had a privileged upbringing but demonstrated a keen social conscience early in life. His father, Ring Lardner, Sr., was a famous humorist, and his uncle, John Lardner, was a renowned sportswriter. Lardner attended elite schools like Phillips Academy and Princeton University, which honed his literary skills. In the 1930s, he moved to Hollywood, initially working as a publicist for David O. Selznick, who gave him his first big break by allowing him to rewrite dialogue for the 1937 film A Star Is Born. As Lardner’s career in Hollywood blossomed, so did his political awareness. Concerned about the rise of fascism in Europe, he joined the Communist Party and became active in the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. This combination of talent and political engagement would define his career and lead to his later struggles during the McCarthy era.

Lardner’s early screenwriting career was marked by notable success. In 1943, he won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay for Woman of the Year, a witty romantic comedy starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. Lardner’s sharp dialogue and ability to blend humor with meaningful themes made him a sought-after screenwriter in Hollywood. However, despite his success, Lardner’s political views placed him under the scrutiny of the U.S. government, especially during the post-World War II Red Scare. His involvement with the Communist Party and his outspoken views on fascism made him a target for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

In 1947, Lardner was subpoenaed by HUAC and became one of the "Hollywood Ten," a group of screenwriters and directors who refused to answer questions regarding their political affiliations. When asked by the committee if he had ever been a member of the Communist Party, Lardner responded with a line that would go down in history: “I could answer the question exactly the way you want, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.” For this refusal to cooperate, he was convicted of contempt of Congress, fined $1,000, and sentenced to a year in Danbury Prison. Lardner’s legal fees forced him to sell his home in Santa Monica, which he humorously advertised with the tagline “Owner Going to Jail.” His wit remained intact even as his life took a drastic turn.

The Hollywood blacklist severely impacted Lardner's career. After his release from prison, he found it increasingly difficult to get work in the film industry, which had effectively blacklisted anyone with suspected Communist ties. 

However, Lardner did not give up on writing. For years, he worked uncredited on various films and television projects, always hoping the blacklist would eventually lift. His optimism kept him going, but the blacklist lasted longer than he expected. In 1965, Lardner’s name finally appeared on screen again when he received credit for his work on The Cincinnati Kid, signaling the end of his official blacklisting.

Lardner’s career experienced a significant resurgence in 1970 when he won his second Academy Award for Best Screenplay for MASH*, a dark comedy about a U.S. Army medical unit during the Korean War. The film was a critical and commercial success, and it reestablished Lardner as a leading screenwriter in Hollywood. However, despite the success of MASH*, Lardner turned down an offer to adapt the film into a television series, believing that the material would not translate well to the small screen. Ironically, MASH* went on to become one of the most successful and beloved TV shows of all time.

Lardner continued to write screenplays and books throughout the 1970s and 1980s, though he never quite recaptured the same level of success he had achieved with MASH*. Despite this, he remained a respected figure in Hollywood, known not only for his writing but also for his resilience in the face of adversity. His experience with the blacklist, while painful, did not destroy his spirit or his career. Lardner lived long enough to see a shift in public perception regarding the Hollywood Ten. 

By the late 20th century, many of the men and women who had been blacklisted were recognized for their courage in standing up to HUAC, and their careers were reexamined in a more positive light.

Lardner’s story is emblematic of the struggles faced by those in the entertainment industry during the Red Scare. The Hollywood blacklist destroyed careers and lives, but for some, like Lardner, it also became a badge of honor. In his later years, Lardner reflected on the experience with a mix of pride and bitterness. While he never regretted standing up for his principles, he also recognized the tremendous personal cost that came with defying HUAC and the government’s anti-Communist crusade.

Lardner passed away in 2000 at the age of 85, leaving behind a legacy as one of Hollywood’s most talented and principled screenwriters. His ability to blend humor, wit, and social commentary in his work made him a unique voice in American cinema. 

More importantly, his refusal to bow to political pressure during one of the most turbulent periods in American history cemented his place not only in Hollywood’s pantheon but also in the broader story of American civil liberties. Today, Ring Lardner, Jr. is remembered not just for his screenwriting but also for his courage in the face of political persecution, a legacy that continues to inspire writers and activists alike.

Alone among the Hollywood Ten, Lardner brandished humor not as escape but as subversion. His refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, punctuated by his immortal quip, “I could answer it, but if I did I would hate myself in the morning,” remains the single greatest zinger in the otherwise dreary transcript of Cold War inquisition.

Yet Lardner was more than a cocktail-party raconteur trapped in a cell at Danbury. He was an artist of paradox, who understood that comedy, when executed with precision, becomes the most unsparing of moral scalps. 

The legendary final line of A Star is Born (1937), “This is Mrs. Norman Maine,” uncredited but almost certainly his, lacerates gender roles while sanctifying romantic tragedy. Nothing Sacred (1937), devised with George Oppenheimer, turns media myth-making into farce; its heroine fakes her death and embarks on a honeymoon, only to be chastised by passengers for slandering her own legend. This is not mere irony—it is the comedy of social amnesia.

Lardner's pathway to radicalism was as direct as it was familial. From a father who disdained pretension and cast his vote for socialism, to Princeton’s Socialist Club and a 1934 summer in the Soviet Union, Lardner's ideological commitment predated his cinematic ambitions. The war years brought work on the Dr. Christian films, written with Ian McLellan Hunter and directed by Bernard Vorhaus.

These films, deceptively sentimental, smuggled public health advocacy and New Deal collectivism into the safe envelope of small-town Americana. In The Courageous Dr. Christian (1940), squatters, shantytowns, and epidemics are not melodramatic backdrops but central crises, dramatized with a rhetoric of hope: "There isn't a community in this country that won't meet a responsibility if it's pointed out to them clearly."

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall attend HUAC in The Hollywood Ten (1950)

But it was in Woman of the Year (1942), written with Michael Kanin, that Lardner's wit flowered into feminist critique. Tess Harding is the apotheosis of the Hepburn woman: brilliant, polylingual, and politically sophisticated. 

The original ending—which saw Tess and Sam reconciling ringside at a boxing match, neither victorious, both changed—was replaced by a retrograde culinary humiliation in which Hepburn fumbles with toast and waffles. Hepburn herself called it "a bunch of shit." Lardner's vision was clear: equality tempered not by subservience, but by respect.

Then came Laura (1944), Tomorrow the World (1944), and Forever Amber (1947)—projects reshaped by Lardner's incisive rewrites and structural ingenuity. He added ambiguity where others feared nuance, and depth where the studios demanded gloss. In Laura, his uncredited polish gave Waldo Lydecker the venomous quip: “I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.” In Amber, he transformed a florid historical novel into a Restoration parable of lust, plague, and maternal longing, suturing satire into melodrama.

Then: silence. The Forbidden Street (1949) bore his name, but the blacklist soon followed. Zanuck dismissed him under the aegis of moral responsibility; America, having finished with fascism, needed a new enemy. Communism, or rather the idea of it, sufficed. In The Ecstasy of Owen Muir (1954), Lardner turned his incarceration into satire, producing a Catholic bildungsroman turned farce, a philosophical slapstick in which theology, ideology, and psychosexual obsession collapse into one another.

Throughout the 1950s, Lardner wrote in exile, under pseudonyms, mostly for British television. The Adventures of Robin Hood became a Trojan horse for class politics; under names like Oliver Skene, he and Hunter injected Saxon-Norman tensions with New Deal dialectics. Back home, he was barred from Studio One, Playhouse 90—all the temples of postwar tele-drama. Fiction and stage offered only intermittent refuge: Foxy (1964), a Yukon-set musical Volpone starring Bert Lahr, offered riches in parody but scant receipts.

Lardner's second life began in 1964 with The Cincinnati Kid and peaked in 1970 with MASH*. Here, the satire turned surgical. The Mobile Army Surgical Hospital became a theatre of cruelty, chaos, and counterculture. Lardner, in script, kept the humor literary—describing gags like blackout sketches, stitching burlesque into trauma. 

When Altman muted the language and amplified the mise-en-scène, Lardner found himself the author of an antiwar film whose tonal instability was its very thesis: in an absurd war, absurdity is survival.

His last major work, The Greatest (1977), fell flat. By then, the satirical current had changed course. But Lardner remained a writer of unfinished projects and unproduced brilliance—a General Custer biopic, a Spanish Civil War epic, even Pal Joey. None were made. As Philip Dunne would lament, "we were all deprived of the movies Ring Lardner was not allowed to write."

In the end, Ring Lardner, Jr. was not a martyr but a metaphysician of mirth, a tragicomic diagnostician of American delusion. He believed in laughter not as escape, but as exorcism. And for fifteen years, America banned the doctor from his rounds.

*

Samuel Ornitz

If John Howard Lawson was the Hollywood Ten’s doctrinaire theorist, and Ring Lardner, Jr. its resident ironist, then Samuel Ornitz was its patriarch—a figure of commanding moral authority, literary dexterity, and principled obstinacy. 

He was also, anomalously, the only member of the Ten for whom the term “novelist” might not have been a euphemism. Among a group derided for their politics rather than their prose, Ornitz remains the rare instance of a political artist whose commitment to ideology enhanced, rather than obscured, his artistic vision—at least before the motion picture industry consumed his creative energies.

Born on Hester Street in 1890, Ornitz emerged from the polyphonic, polyglot chaos of the Lower East Side, the son of prosperous wool merchants and a product of the Henry Street School. By the age of twelve, he was a soapbox socialist—an autodidact who believed, even then, that literature could serve the people and that reform was not merely a political project but an imaginative one. He abandoned college for social work, devoting over a decade to prisons and abused children, experiences which profoundly shaped his political and literary ethos.

His first literary forays, under the debonair pseudonym Don Orno, were exercises in proletarian dramaturgy. The Sock, a Dostoevskian morality play, enacts a philosophical murder not as existential parable but as social necessity. The rhetoric is purple, the tone strident, but the political ambition is unmistakable: to merge Raskolnikov’s moral introspection with Marxist urgency. This convergence of literary high-mindedness and social utility would define Ornitz’s early career.

It is, however, in Haunch Paunch and Jowl (1923) that Ornitz finds his true voice. This semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman is a brash and lyrical work—at once affectionate toward and caustic about Jewish immigrant life. The protagonist, Meyer Hirsch, functions as both surrogate and foil: the embodiment of assimilationist failure and bourgeois compromise. The novel’s nostalgic invocation of childhood in the Jewish ghetto is tempered by an unsparing critique of communal insularity and capitalist ambition. The work is not merely an artifact of ethnic literature; it is a sustained meditation on the failure of the American dream from the perspective of one of its earliest dissenters.

His subsequent novel, A Yankee Passional (1927), ventures further afield into Irish-Catholic psychodrama, tracing a mystic’s tortured passage through erotic asceticism and religious doubt. Ornitz, a professed atheist, writes with surprising empathy about faith and the politics of sanctity, exposing the psychic wreckage wrought by dogma and desire. The novel culminates not in resolution but in symbolic martyrdom—its hero undone not by God, but by the ideological corruption of institutional religion. One sees in it the germ of Ornitz’s later cinematic work: polemical in form, yet poetic in detail.

By the 1930s, however, fiction gave way to function. With fascism rising and capitalism crumbling, Ornitz became a professional anti-fascist, financing his activism by writing screenplays. The decision, while pragmatic, marked the slow erosion of his literary voice. 

Though he penned scripts of moral weight—Hell’s Highway (1932), for example, is a ferocious indictment of penal brutality—he was ultimately at odds with the constraints of the studio system. Hollywood required tractability; Ornitz offered polemic.

What distinguishes Ornitz as a screenwriter is not his technical prowess but the ideological density he smuggled into even the most conventional fare. In The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (1935), pacifism is dramatized as tragic necessity; the World War I backdrop becomes a canvas for exposing the mendacity of arms dealers and the complicity of media. 

Likewise, China’s Little Devils (1945), his last film, deploys wartime melodrama to elevate orphaned Chinese children into allegorical warriors, resisting Japanese imperialism with the moral clarity adult nations lacked.

In the margins of the B-list and Poverty Row, Ornitz inserted provocations. It Could Happen to You (1937), written with Nathanael West, turns fascism into farce, its narrative arc so implausible as to render the threat dreamlike. In Three Faces West (1940), he finds a more effective register, aligning Dust Bowl migration with refugee displacement and recasting American exceptionalism as a function of antifascist solidarity. That John Wayne should serve as the vehicle for such a message is only one of the film’s many ironies.

Yet Ornitz was never fully assimilated by the industry. He lacked the guile of a studio craftsman and resisted the commodification of his ideals. His most personal work remained unpublished or uncredited. Circumstantial Evidence (1945), officially attributed to others, bears unmistakable traces of his authorship—particularly in its moral framework and its portrayal of children as truth-tellers in a world of corrupted adults.

copied from Radical Innocence A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE Hollywood Ten by Bernard F. Dick, THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY, 1989, ISBN 0-8131-1660-0

His return to fiction, with Bride of the Sabbath (1951), marked a poetic coda. Set again in the Lower East Side, the novel is a nostalgic reverie—part memoir, part fable. Its protagonist, Saul Kramer, is an avatar of secular idealism, suspended between ethnic memory and progressive aspiration. 

The novel is less structured than sculpted—a series of finely wrought tableaux strung together by recollection. At its center is Baba, a matriarch whose faith is both absurd and sublime, and whose death marks the symbolic passage from tradition to modernity.

In Bride, Ornitz captures the Sabbath not as religious obligation but as aesthetic ritual. His reverence for the rhythms and textures of Jewish life—braided hair, coral necklaces, goose fat on matzo—transcends belief. He does not believe in the divine, but he venerates the beauty it once summoned. The novel is a final act of literary piety, not to God, but to the sanctity of lived experience.

By the time of his death in 1957, Samuel Ornitz had become a relic to Hollywood and a ghost to literature. He died with dignity but in relative obscurity, his cinematic work overshadowed by his politics, his literary contributions neglected in favor of his blacklist martyrdom. Yet his significance lies not in his persecution but in the peculiar integrity of his path: from soapbox to screen, from the ghetto to Hollywood, he never relinquished his faith in the power of narrative as moral force.

In the age of spectacle, Ornitz remained committed to substance. He was, above all, a man of stories—stories in which ideology and empathy coexisted uneasily but indelibly. The patriarch of the Ten deserves to be remembered not merely for his defiance, but for the quiet dignity of his craft.

*

John Howard Lawson

John Howard Lawson was the playwright who mistook Hollywood for a debating hall, then proceeded to argue with it until the doors were locked behind him. Arriving in 1928, he was the first of the Ten to do so, and certainly the most theoretically equipped. By that time, five of his plays had been produced on Broadway, and a burgeoning academic fascination with his work had already taken root. Alone among the Ten, Lawson has been the subject of doctoral dissertations—an irony not lost on a man who, by temperament, detested institutions but nonetheless craved recognition from them.

His theatrical output, though unrevived, is canonical in its reflection of the shift from decadent 1920s expressionism to 1930s didacticism. The transformation is not merely aesthetic—it is ideological, tectonic. Lawson began as a dramatist haunted by the ghosts of Georg Kaiser and Frank Wedekind, writing theatrical jazz fantasias like Roger Bloomer and Processional, plays that offered syncopated mockery of bourgeois dreams. But the laughter curdled. The leap from absurdity to militancy was inevitable. 

By the mid-1930s, Lawson was no longer searching for form; he was imposing structure—with the clenched fist of dialectical materialism.

His conversion to Communism in 1934 was not a renunciation of art, but its redefinition. What he had once envisioned as jazz ballet became march, drumbeat, and slogans. Plays like Gentlewoman and The Pure in Heart reveal a writer who has traded ambiguity for allegiance. In them, we see the template that would define his later work: characters divided between conscience and complicity, lovers fated for oblivion, redemption imagined not in romance but in revolution. 

His final stage work, Marching Song, married Aristotelian form with Soviet content, laboring to construct a politically unified field theory of dramatic action.

Lawson’s Hollywood years are best read as a lab experiment in the possibilities and limitations of ideological cinema under capitalism. After cutting his teeth at MGM and clashing with Cecil B. DeMille—an inevitable dialectical collision—he moved to RKO, where he demonstrated that even romantic fluff like Bachelor Apartment could be an exercise in class conflict. 

His screenwriting, always taut, grew increasingly allegorical. Blockade (1938) dramatized the Spanish Civil War without naming it. Algiers (1938) gave Casablanca noir a proletarian shadow. They Shall Have Music (1939) cast child musicians as street-level revolutionaries with violins.

Yet Lawson never achieved the elegant subversion of Abraham Polonsky, nor the bitter lyricism of Dalton Trumbo. What he offered instead was a cinema of compression and assertion—films as clenched arguments. Action in the North Atlantic (1943) is his most significant screen achievement: a Marxist seafarer’s epic disguised as a Warner Bros. war picture. 

The script is pure Lawson: montage rhythms cribbed from Eisenstein, ideological tensions couched in character tropes, a five-act structure culminating not in victory, but synthesis. Soviet pilots descend like cinematic deities to rescue the Liberty Ship and its American crew—"comrades" by climax.

Even his more sentimental scripts bore the thumbprint of critique. Smash-Up (1947), which earned Susan Hayward her first Oscar nomination, is both a woman’s melodrama and a feminist diagnosis of bourgeois entropy. Its alcoholic heroine isn’t a tragic figure of private despair but the inevitable casualty of a leisure class stripped of meaning. That Lawson, the high priest of proletarian manhood, authored such a diagnosis is a testament to his critical imagination—even as the execution remained bound by genre.

While Lawson the screenwriter navigated studio mandates with varying degrees of grace, Lawson the theorist emerged as his more enduring incarnation. Theory and Technique of Playwriting and Screenwriting (1949) was his bible and blueprint—a fusion of Aristotle and Hegel, in which the well-made play becomes the pedagogical arm of revolution.

For Lawson, the “root-action” (his preferred neologism) was not simply dramatic—it was political. He demanded from drama what the Party demanded from him: clarity of class position, clarity of will, and ultimately, clarity of form. It is no coincidence that his definition of climax bears resemblance to dialectical resolution—thesis, antithesis, synthesis, then history.

His allegiance to form made him a surprisingly conservative radical. While Brecht pursued epic fragmentation, Lawson clung to the three-act arc, convinced that narrative unity was not merely aesthetic but moral.

This commitment proved invaluable in Hollywood, where narrative propulsion remained the one demand no writer could escape. Yet his work, even when diluted by studios, never surrendered its underlying tensions. Sahara (1943), Counter-Attack (1945), and Four Sons (1940) are not just war stories; they are dialectical experiments conducted under censorship.

Of course, Lawson’s career was truncated not by failure, but by politics. As HUAC’s first victim in 1947, he set the tone—refusing to name names, quoting Thomas Jefferson, and being ejected from the hearings. His contempt of court conviction marked not the end of his creativity but its relocation. Blacklisted, he turned to criticism and pedagogy. If he could no longer write screenplays, he would write their anatomy.

His later texts—Film: The Creative Process (1957), Film in the Battle of Ideas (1953)—are dense, didactic, and essential. They argue, relentlessly, that cinema must either serve the people or serve power. For Lawson, ambiguity was always an abdication. He wanted his cinema to punch, not whisper. And so even his praise of films like Fury (1936) or The Grapes of Wrath (1940) was calibrated to their social clarity, not their subtleties.

Yet Lawson’s great contradiction—like that of all utopian artists—was that his most compelling work was often at odds with his own ideological prescriptions. He could sketch archetypes, but not always human beings. He believed in dialectic, but often feared ambiguity. His insistence on “root-action” limited the chaotic vitality that cinema thrives on. And while his Marxism lent moral clarity to his criticism, it sometimes hardened into orthodoxy.

"This is Mrs Lawson. She and their children will wait for him."

Still, among the Hollywood Ten, John Howard Lawson stands as the movement’s architect. He was not its martyr, nor its most gifted screenwriter, but its theorist and its spine. Others endured the blacklist longer, wrote better films, or found their way back into Hollywood’s good graces. Lawson never returned. 

He became what his films foreshadowed: a man defined by refusal. In this, he was both admirable and tragic—a dramatist who demanded that narrative have an endpoint, and whose own story, cruelly, never did.

*

Herbert J. Biberman

Herbert Biberman, born in Philadelphia in 1900, began his career in the family business but soon gravitated towards drama, eventually working at New York’s Theater Guild. In 1935, he transitioned to Hollywood, where he started as a dialogue director before becoming a writer and occasional director. His films included the mystery Meet Nero Wolfe (1936), the crime drama King of Chinatown (1939), and the anti-Nazi film The Master Race (1944).

Of all the Hollywood Ten, Herbert Biberman remains the most paradoxical figure: a man whose passions for theatre and film were equaled only by his unwavering political convictions. Initially destined for a conventional career in the family clothing business, Biberman abandoned capitalism for the stage, studying under the venerable George Pierce Baker at Yale. Here, among the lingering ghosts of Philip Barry and Eugene O'Neill, he embraced the avant-garde, though his early forays into expressionist drama, such as When the Blind See and Servants or Masters, revealed more ambition than originality. His works, suffused with Marxist allegory and heavy-handed symbolism, failed to captivate either critics or audiences.

Despite tepid reception, Biberman persisted, pivoting naturally toward direction, where his flair for large-scale stagecraft emerged. A pilgrimage to the Soviet Union cemented his ideological fervor, and on returning to New York, he insinuated himself into the Theatre Guild, initially as a stage manager. His productions — notably Roar China and Green Grow the Lilacs — combined technical bravura with an overtly politicized populism, the "people" serving not as characters but as revolutionary abstractions. For Biberman, art was a hammer, and every audience, an anvil.

Yet Biberman's abrasiveness, both personal and rhetorical, alienated collaborators. His habit of treating meetings as ideological battlegrounds led to the inevitable rupture with the Guild. Temporarily recalled to co-direct Valley Forge, he found Broadway increasingly inhospitable and, like many leftist intellectuals of the 1930s, migrated westward to Hollywood.

Herbert Biberman's Salt of The Earth (1954) Wikimedia

There, his directorial debut with One Way Ticket and Meet Nero Wolfe confirmed a crucial limitation: Biberman could stage a scene but not animate it cinematically. His films were inert tableaux, indifferent to the kinetic demands of the medium. His understanding of cinema remained stubbornly theatrical, an unfortunate trait given Hollywood's shifting aesthetic imperatives.

Nevertheless, Biberman carved out a modest niche, contributing the story for King of Chinatown, a rare vehicle for Anna May Wong. His commitment to minority representation, while politically motivated, was genuine if paternalistic. Throughout the 1930s and '40s, he produced a welter of unpublished stories, plays, and scripts, all united by the theme of the oppressed transcending their condition through collective struggle. Subtlety was alien to him; each work resembled a clenched fist more than an open hand.

Hollywood in wartime briefly provided a congenial environment for Biberman's brand of message-driven art. Yet even as he wrote patriotic radio plays and agitprop stories, he became more deeply enmeshed in political activism — founding the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, campaigning for the Spanish Loyalists, and later attempting to rationalize the Nazi-Soviet pact to disillusioned fellow travelers. His ideological rigidity often outstripped political reality.

By the 1940s, Biberman found work at RKO, co-writing and directing minor efforts like Action in Arabia and The Master Race. The latter, despite noble intentions, collapsed under the weight of its own didacticism, presenting Nazi evil in cartoonishly broad strokes. Any promise of a long-term Hollywood career evaporated; RKO dropped his contract without ceremony.

Nevertheless, Biberman remained indefatigable. As associate producer of Abilene Town and uncredited influencer on New Orleans, he labored to inject his populist ethos into otherwise conventional projects. Yet the blacklist curtailed even these modest contributions, relegating him to the margins of the industry he had once hoped to transform.

It was the blacklist itself that precipitated Biberman’s sole masterpiece: Salt of the Earth (1954). Produced independently alongside fellow exiles Paul Jarrico and Michael Wilson, the film was a direct affront to Cold War orthodoxy, dramatizing a strike led by Mexican-American miners and their wives. Here, finally, Biberman’s political absolutism found its perfect narrative vessel. The film's fusion of class, race, and gender struggles epitomized his belief in "the indivisibility of equality," a concept rendered cinematically through the evolving partnership between husband and wife.

The aesthetics of Salt of the Earth mirrored its politics: amateur actors, documentary realism, a heroine narrator whose voice subsumed and redefined the film’s masculine structures. Despite moments of clumsy acting and crude symbolism, the film remains a rare artifact where ideology and art converge without one suffocating the other. Predictably, it was met not with acclaim but with censorship, blacklisting, and sabotage — a martyrdom Biberman seemed almost to court.

Yet Biberman's post-Salt career faltered. His dream of a People’s Film Company producing works about Black liberation collapsed under the weight of naïve paternalism and financial impracticality. Scripts like An American Story and aborted projects on Frederick Douglass revealed a deep-seated inability to engage evolving political realities without recourse to patronizing didacticism.

His final cinematic mantelpiece, yes that is right, Slaves (1969), marked a tragic coda. Ostensibly a retelling of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the film veered into lurid melodrama, with political themes reduced to coarse allegory and performances trapped in minstrel caricature. Despite earnest intentions, Biberman's vision was fatally anachronistic, his aesthetic instincts stranded between agitprop and exploitation cinema.

When Herbert Biberman died in 1971, he left behind a filmography modest in quantity and uneven in quality, but marked by an undeniable sincerity. His unshakeable belief in the transformative power of collective action, though often crudely expressed, remains a testament to the ideological passion that once animated American radical culture. Biberman may never have achieved the artistic heights to which he aspired, but in the embattled legacy of Salt of the Earth, he secured his place as the cinema’s most dogged revolutionary martyr.

Like Bessie, Biberman's political beliefs drew the attention of HUAC. He refused to answer their questions and was fined and sentenced to six months in prison. His wife, actress Gale Sondergaard, was also blacklisted for refusing to testify. After his imprisonment, Biberman directed Salt of the Earth (1954), a groundbreaking film about a miners’ strike in New Mexico. Made by blacklisted artists, the film was denounced by the U.S. government, and its release was suppressed for over a decade.

"Always, he devoted his energies to decency and humanity."

Despite the challenges, Salt of the Earth gained critical acclaim abroad and was later recognized as culturally significant, being preserved by the U.S. National Film Registry in 1993. Biberman died of bone cancer in 1971, having left behind a legacy of both artistic achievement and political resistance.

*

Dalton Trumbo

Of all the Hollywood Ten, none looms larger in the popular and scholarly imagination than Dalton Trumbo, whose paradoxical renown stems less from the specifics of his Communist affiliation than from his protean literary voice and enduring cinematic legacy. He is the only member of the group to have achieved what can be termed posthumous pop stardom: name-dropped in Westwood cafés, lionized in film school syllabi, and resurrected in the eponymous 2015 biopic.

Yet beneath the mythos of the man who "broke the blacklist" lies a body of work suffused with philosophical melancholy, rhetorical fire, and a belief in the salvific power of narrative.

Born in Montrose, Colorado, in 1905, and raised in nearby Grand Junction, Trumbo's early life was defined by a form of provincial intellectual hunger. He read voraciously and wrote constantly. By the time he was in high school, he had assumed the role of critic-in-residence for his small town’s parochial absurdities. His earliest efforts—unpublished essays, poems, and sermons—bear the marks of a mind already bent toward both moralism and theatricality. 

After moving to Los Angeles, he enrolled at the University of Southern California, but financial need soon overtook academic ambition. He took a job at the Davis Perfection Bakery, where he would work for nearly a decade, writing at night and learning, as he later put it, "to endure drudgery without anesthetic."

This period, long dismissed by biographers as Trumbo’s economic purgatory, in fact provided the fertile soil for his literary maturation. His apprenticeship in daily labor, far from numbing his intellect, deepened his concern with dignity and economic justice—key themes in his short fiction of the early 1930s, much of which remains unpublished. These stories abound with figures of failure: itinerant workers, suicidal idealists, tubercular poets, each etched with psychological complexity and formal restraint. They are not proletarian in the mold of Mike Gold or Jack Conroy, but existentially proletarian—haunted by the specter of irrelevance.

By 1935, Trumbo had turned to the novel. Eclipse (1935), a thinly veiled portrait of Grand Junction, is less a work of realism than a spiritual geography of resentment and decay. The novel is structurally ambitious, episodic, and replete with characters mired in parochial anti-intellectualism. Washington Jitters (1937), a satire of bureaucratic absurdity, reveals Trumbo's mastery of voice and pacing, and anticipates the didactic wit of his later screenplays. 

Critics at the time compared him—unfavorably—to Sinclair Lewis, but it would be more apt to see these novels as modernist reportage, a kind of literary muckraking with philosophical depth.

His breakthrough came with Johnny Got His Gun (1939), a novel as much as a formalist experiment as it is an antiwar tract. Its structure—nonlinear, interior, agonizingly tactile—owed less to traditional narrative and more to Joyce, Woolf, and Dos Passos. The protagonist, Joe Bonham, a quadruple amputee robbed of all senses save touch and thought, becomes Trumbo's embodiment of rhetorical exile. 

His mind—oscillating between memory, hallucination, and philosophical rumination—functions as the novel’s moral and epistemological engine. Here, Trumbo articulates his core aesthetic credo: that silence is the enemy of freedom, and that speech, no matter how futile, must persist.

With the advent of World War II, Trumbo shifted toward screenplay work with overt ideological undertones. His scripts during the war years—A Guy Named Joe (1943), Tender Comrade (1943), Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944)—are suffused with patriotic rhetoric, yet each reveals a substructure of political ambivalence. The dialogue in Tender Comrade, in particular, attracted HUAC’s attention for its collectivist sympathies, despite its surface-level nationalism. 

Yet for Trumbo, wartime screenwriting was an opportunity to sermonize under the aegis of genre. His characters often functioned as vessels for Jeffersonian declamation: liberty, sacrifice, and democratic idealism were not thematic afterthoughts but the very scaffolding of plot.

His HUAC testimony in 1947 was characteristically eloquent and combative. Refusing to name names, he challenged the committee’s legal legitimacy and moral authority, asserting the primacy of constitutional rights over ideological witch-hunting. This defiance led to his imprisonment in 1950. Upon release, blacklisted and unemployable under his own name, Trumbo turned to pseudonymous authorship with alacrity and fury. His screenplays, written in secret, often via proxies or "fronts," formed a clandestine canon of resistance literature.

Among the most notable are Gun Crazy (1950), The Prowler (1951), and The Brave One (1956), the latter earning him an Academy Award under the alias "Robert Rich"—a victory both farcical and sublime. Even his "lesser" works from the period, such as The Boss or The Green-Eyed Blonde, bear the fingerprints of his preoccupation with injustice and identity. These films, often categorized as noir or melodrama, smuggled subversive ideology under the veil of genre convention.

The de-blacklisting of Trumbo was not a spontaneous act of institutional grace, but a carefully orchestrated confrontation. With the help of Kirk Douglas (Spartacus) and Otto Preminger (Exodus), he was publicly credited in 1960, thus breaching the blacklist’s absurd wall of silence. These epics, while thematically distinct, share a Trumboan core: they are allegories of defiance. Their protagonists are tortured orators, compelled to speech, burdened with truth. The drama of both films hinges on ethical articulation—an overt nod to Trumbo's own embattled career.

Ironically, the reinstatement of Trumbo coincided with a decline in the urgency of his artistic output. The Sandpiper (1965) is bloated with self-importance; Hawaii (1966) substitutes bombast for insight. His directorial turn with Johnny Got His Gun (1971), while formally courageous, suffers from aesthetic inertia—its radical intentions undermined by televisual flatness. 

Yet his final work, the unfinished novel Night of the Aurochs, suggests a late style of baroque psychological inquiry. It is a grotesque internal monologue from the perspective of a Nazi commandant—Mein Kampf as existential horror. Here, Trumbo moves beyond polemic into something darker, more ambiguous, and formally experimental.

Throughout, the throughline in Trumbo's career remains his belief in the redemptive function of language. His characters speak not merely to advance plot but to enact ethical possibility. They sermonize, not because they are didactic, but because for Trumbo, speech is resistance, articulation is existence. 

He believed, with the fervor of a secular preacher, that the right sequence of words could move institutions and ignite conscience. The climax of Exodus, the closing monologue of Johnny Got His Gun, and the hidden dialogues of The Brave One are all iterations of this belief: that language, properly wielded, is the most potent form of protest.

In the final accounting, Trumbo did not transcend politics; he aestheticized it. He dramatized the individual caught between two poles: silence and speech, complicity and dissent. His work remains a monument to the ethical power of narrative and the irreducible dignity of articulation. 

Among the Hollywood Ten, the Trombonerman is the only one whose name adorns Oscar ballots, whose rhetoric continues to resonate, and whose ghost still haunts the guilds. He remains, above all, the cinema’s most eloquent martyr.

*

Alvah Bessie

Good old Alvah Bessie, perhaps the most paradoxical and protean of the Hollywood Ten, is not one of supreme cinematic consequence—certainly not if measured solely by his studio output, a modest cluster of five screenplays between 1943 and 1948—but rather by the ideological and literary fervor that suffused his life and work like a consuming fire. 

Here is what the Dictionary of the World had to say last evening: Born in New York City in 1904, Alvah Bessie began his career with a diverse range of pursuits. After attending Columbia University, he worked as both an actor and screenwriter for Eugene O'Neill's Provincetown Players. In addition to his stage work, Bessie published stories and articles in prestigious outlets like The New Republic and Scribner's. 

In 1935, he released his first novel, Dwell in the Wilderness, while also writing for The New Yorker. Bessie's life took a decisive turn in 1938 when he joined other intellectuals to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. His memoir of that experience, Men in Battle, published in 1939, was lauded by Ernest Hemingway for its honesty and integrity.

Bessie's work in Hollywood began in 1943 when he moved to California to write for Warner Brothers. He worked on several notable films, including Northern Pursuit (1943) and Hotel Berlin (1945), but his most significant achievement came with a Best Story Oscar nomination for Objective, Burma! (1945). However, his career was abruptly derailed when HUAC called him to testify in 1947. Bessie refused to cooperate, denouncing the committee as a tool of intimidation and repression. As a result, he was sentenced to a year in prison for contempt of Congress.

After his release, Bessie found himself blacklisted and unable to continue his career as a screenwriter. He took on various odd jobs, including running lights at a San Francisco nightclub and working as a publicist for arts organizations. He also wrote several books, including The Un-Americans (1957) and Inquisition in Eden (1965), which reflected on his Hollywood experiences. Bessie passed away in 1985 from a heart attack.

ALVAH BESSIE By Unknown | Original publication: Unknown | Immediate source: https://www.barcelona-metropolitan.com/whats-on/hollywood-against-franco/, Fair use, Link

The Bessmeister General's presence on the blacklist was not a consequence of artistic magnitude in Hollywood per se, but of the almost devotional zeal with which he pursued political and moral truth across the volatile terrain of mid-twentieth-century America. Bessie, unlike some of his co-defendants in the HUAC hearings, never attained celebrity through scandal; he was neither lionized nor redeemed by the very industry that expelled him. 

He was, in many respects, the exemplar of what it means to be committed without reward, to die artistically so that some idea, however inchoate or compromised, might live.

Born in 1904 and educated at Columbia University, Bessie was the consummate East Coast intellectual—an erudite and restlessly aspiring artist whose career traversed theater, fiction, journalism, and finally screenwriting, not as a natural evolution but as a reluctant descent into the remunerative swamps of Hollywood. 

After graduating in English and French in 1924, Bessie gravitated toward the American theater, not as a writer but as a stage manager and actor, performing in productions including Eugene O’Neill’s numinously overreaching Lazarus Laughed. Yet even in those theatrical interludes, the writing impulse in Bessie smoldered beneath the proscenium.

Paris—then the city of sanctified exile for American modernists—was the place where Bessie discovered his literary metier. There, amid the cosmopolitan dislocations of the expatriate community, he composed his first short story, “Redbird” (1929), and commenced the first in a series of literary peregrinations that would eventually encompass the American Midwest, Loyalist Spain, wartime Hollywood, and postwar persecution.

His short fiction, though unevenly distributed and modest in volume—fewer than twenty stories over two decades—reveals a storyteller of intuitive rhythm and emotional precision. Indeed, Bessie’s early stories demonstrate a flair for the lyric grotesque and the psychologically liminal. “The Serpent Was More Subtil” is a remarkable study in adolescent sublimation, cloaked in the trappings of naturalist reverie. 

In “Profession of Pain” (1935), he veers into black comedy, delineating the lurid ingenuity of a junkie who so convincingly feigns nephrolithiasis that a surgeon excises a kidney. This is not mere social realism but something stranger, more elusive—an incipient American grotesque that marries gallows humor with the author’s intrinsic skepticism of bourgeois morality.

But Bessie, ever restless, was not content with the brevity and refinement demanded by the short story form. In 1935 he published Dwell in the Wilderness, an ambitious but baggy multigenerational family chronicle tracing a Midwestern clan across half a century. 

The novel straddles the poles of romanticism and realism, literary aspiration and didactic sociologism, ultimately achieving neither a coherent aesthetic identity nor a commanding narrative trajectory. It is a debut novel that confesses too much—of the author’s literary influences, political sympathies, and formal uncertainties. And yet, in moments such as Eben’s plaintive letter from a Detroit rooming house, Bessie touches real pathos, evoking the economic emasculation of the Depression-era patriarch with restraint and sorrow.

The Spanish Civil War—the crucible of internationalist idealism—was Bessie’s crucifixion and resurrection. Volunteering with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, he joined a cosmopolitan phalanx of the radicalized and the disillusioned who saw in Republican Spain the last bulwark against fascist contagion. 

The experience would calcify Bessie’s ideological orientation and fuel his finest book, Men in Battle (1939), a memoir of astonishing clarity and moral vision. Unlike Hemingway’s posturing romanticism or Malraux’s metaphysical fog, Bessie’s Spain is visceral, tragic, and human—seen not as the theatre of great abstraction but as a locus of unremitting cruelty and occasional grace.

He describes death not as a heroic destiny but a mutilation of flesh and spirit—war stripped of romance, leaving only the brute, unpitying calculus of violence. And yet, Men in Battle pulses with a longing for something transcendent: “They could not accept their death with such good grace if they did not love so deeply and so well.” This line, suspended between sentimentality and conviction, encapsulates Bessie’s belief that political engagement was not merely strategic but spiritual.

His brief flirtation with cinematic work was thus not the logical culmination of his literary and ideological development, but rather a sideline—an expedient form of employment during a wartime Hollywood newly receptive to leftist narratives. Warner Brothers, the most overtly populist of the studios, brought Bessie on to adapt projects with topical urgency: Northern Pursuit (1943), Objective, Burma! (1945), Hotel Berlin (1945), and the lesser-known Smart Woman (1948). 

These were not epics of ideological subversion, but rather patriotic entertainments with occasional flashes of leftist inflection. Indeed, Objective, Burma!—Bessie’s most significant cinematic endeavor—was sabotaged by producer Jerry Wald’s decision to include a speech calling for the extermination of the Japanese. Bessie was aghast, having written a version that condemned fascism without succumbing to jingoistic genocide. 

It was a bitter reminder that even as the Allies waged a war against tyranny, they were not immune to its rhetorical excesses.

Bessie’s screenplays, while rarely masterpieces, contain ideological filaments that reflect his worldview. In Northern Pursuit, the Errol Flynn character—a German-Canadian Mountie—expresses nuanced ambivalence about nationalism and loyalty. Hotel Berlin, co-written with Jo Pagano, attempts to salvage moral ambiguity from the wreckage of total war, delineating degrees of complicity and defiance among Germans at the end of the Third Reich. 

There is a moral calculus in Bessie’s characters—collaboration is contextualized, not universally condemned; redemption is possible, though never easy. Women like Tillie, the prostitute who aided Jews and joined the resistance, are portrayed not as ideological pawns but as tragic moral agents. Even Lisa Dorn, the actress-turned-informant, is not demonized, though she is executed—offscreen—in the tradition of noir fatalism.

Bessie’s commitment to leftist principles eventually terminated his cinematic employability. His final Hollywood project, Smart Woman (1948), was a courtroom drama diluted by studio interference. Yet in one remarkable scene, the protagonist—a female defense attorney—takes the stand to exonerate her ex-husband. 

The courtroom speech, written entirely by Bessie, is both an apologia and a critique: “Sometimes, when people don't have anything, and they see that other people do, they can't understand and it warps them.” It is a moment that transcends narrative function and becomes a political credo.

After his expulsion from Warner Brothers—ostensibly for supporting the Conference of Studio Unions—Bessie descended into a morass of blacklist-fueled obscurity. He continued writing scripts, often uncredited or unpublished. A screenplay adaptation of Dayton Stoddart’s Prelude to Night became Ruthless (1948), but his name was excised. The film, in Bessie’s hands, was meant to be a Marxist parable of capitalist excess. The studio diluted it into Citizen Kane pastiche.

Then came the fateful autumn of 1947. Subpoenaed by HUAC, Bessie refused to answer the notorious $64 question about his Communist Party membership. His defiance was swift and sardonic: “Are you kidding?” That simple retort cost him everything. He was convicted of contempt of Congress, fined $1,000, and sentenced to a year in prison. His screenwriting career, such as it was, was effectively over.

But the prison did not silence him. In 1957 he published The Un-Americans, a roman à clef of uncommon ambition, juxtaposing the Spanish Civil War with the Cold War loyalty oaths, HUAC hearings, and moral betrayals. Structured with cinematic intercuts between past and present, it pits two intellectuals—one a dogged Communist, the other a guilt-ridden apostate—against the juggernaut of state paranoia.

The moral dichotomy is simplified; nuance, perhaps deliberately, is sacrificed on the altar of righteousness. But the language crackles with contempt, wounded pride, and the despair of ideological obsolescence.

In The Symbol (1966), Bessie turned to the myth of Marilyn Monroe, fictionalized as Wanda Oliver, a redheaded starlet destroyed by the schism between her commodified sexuality and her inaccessible interiority. Told through psychiatric transcripts and stream-of-consciousness monologues, The Symbol is perhaps Bessie’s most aesthetically sophisticated novel. 

It is not so much a biography as an anatomy of gendered exploitation—how the industry manufactures desire and then devours the desirable. In Wanda’s dissolution is mirrored Bessie’s own rage at the commodification of art and the annihilation of authenticity.

His final major novel, One for My Baby (1980), is a late-life elegy to the beat scene of San Francisco’s North Beach, thinly veiled through the fictional “Night Box.” Bessie had worked for years at the real-life hungry i as stage manager and lighting technician. The novel is filled with portraits of misfits, wounded war veterans, self-loathing comedians, and damaged women. Among them, Monica Butler—a disfigured former starlet who resists pity and embraces stoic selfhood—emerges as one of Bessie’s most powerful characters. 

She is the inversion of Wanda Oliver: not a sex symbol but a survivor, stripped of illusion and narcissism. And yet, the novel meanders. Its structure is diffuse, its conflicts minor, its prose elegant but fatigued. It is the work of a man who, though still writing, has been written out of the literary and political mainstream.

In his later years, Bessie returned to the short story—the form that had once brought him distinction and now offered refuge. In 1982 he published Alvah Bessie’s Short Stories, including new and previously unpublished work. 

Stories like “The Spoils of War” and “The Prisoner’s Dog” are intimate, unsentimental, and morally complex—reaffirming Bessie’s talent for compressed human drama. Yet it was too late. The literary world had moved on; the canon was sealed. Bessie remained what he had always been: a man in ideological exile.

Alvah Bessie died in 1985, aged 81, his name barely a footnote in American literary history. And yet, to those who read beyond the bestseller lists and studio ledgers, his work reveals the contours of a life that refused compromise. He fought for Spain; he fought for labor; he fought for language and for truth, as he understood it. His art was not always great, but his commitment was monumental. And perhaps, in the end, that is enough. Alvah Bessie is thriving on Wikipedia.

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Adrian Scott

There are lives which, once disinterred from the pieties of history and reanimated with the electric pulse of context, cease to resemble mere biographies. They emerge as indictments, meditations, and at times—tragic symphonies. 

Adrian Scott's is one such life: a tenebrous arc not only emblematic of a bruised epoch but one that gleams, even in eclipse, with the refractory light of conviction. Producer, screenwriter, intellectual dissident, apostle of decency—Scott moved through mid-century Hollywood as both catalyst and casualty, leaving behind a brief but incandescent trail of films that dared to place ideology on celluloid. His sin? 

Believing that narrative was not merely ornamental but ethical, that a film might bear witness as fervently as it entertained. In the symphonic wreckage of McCarthyism, he was one of the first to be silenced—and perhaps the one who lost the most.

Adrian Scott was born in 1911 in Arlington, New Jersey, to a middle-class family. His early career saw him writing magazine articles, but by 1940, Scott had transitioned to Hollywood, where he initially contributed as a screenwriter. 

His career as a producer, however, is what truly defined his contribution to American cinema. Teaming up with director Edward Dmytryk, Scott became known for his work on several significant films that helped define the emerging genre of film noir. The Scott-Dmytryk collaboration began with Murder, My Sweet (1944), a hard-edged adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel that set the tone for their future projects.

Scott’s films were not just stylistic exercises in noir but were imbued with deep social and political commentary. Cornered (1945), for instance, was an anti-fascist thriller that reflected Scott’s political beliefs, while Crossfire (1947) was a groundbreaking film that tackled the sensitive issue of anti-Semitism. The latter film received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture for Scott. This string of critically acclaimed films marked Scott as one of Hollywood’s rising producers at a time when the industry was beginning to grapple with darker and more socially relevant themes.

However, Scott’s career came to an abrupt halt when he was summoned to appear before HUAC in 1947. Like his fellow Hollywood Ten members, Scott refused to answer questions about his Communist Party membership, which he had joined in 1944. Despite being at the pinnacle of his career, Scott chose to stand by his principles, even though he had the opportunity to escape prosecution by remaining in Europe. Reflecting on the decision to return to the U.S. and face HUAC, Scott later remarked that fleeing would have left his colleagues vulnerable, and that solidarity with his fellow Hollywood Ten members was paramount. As a result, Scott was fined $1,000 and sentenced to 12 months in prison.

Scott's cinematic career did not so much begin as it coalesced, first in the literary salons of Stage magazine, a precursor to Theatre Arts, where his Amherst credentials and editorial eye collided with another nascent force in Hollywood's moral insurgency: John Paxton. By 1937, both were assistant editors, Scott for film, Paxton for theatre. That convergence would later resound through five of Scott's six major RKO productions, where Paxton served as screenwriter and kindred soul. Though Scott's byline was absent during his tenure at Stage, it is not implausible that his hand ghosted across its unsigned reviews, sharpening his observational acumen while Hollywood still loomed as a mythic citadel in the distance.

His initial foray into screenwriting at MGM and Fox—on Keeping Company (1940) and We Go Fast (1941)—produced no seismic tremors. They were comic trifles, fit for the margins. Yet even in these negligible outings, one glimpses a writer wary of frivolity. Far more revealing was Scott's political and moral gestation in the crucible of 1930s America: the Great Depression's cruel diagnostics, the rise of fascism in Europe, and a growing belief that film might yet serve as sermon. Unlike his brother Allan Scott, who found an easy perch in RKO's musicals (penning such fizzy vehicles as Top Hat and Shall We Dance), Adrian was pulled toward something graver, even ecclesiastical.

This gravitas found early expression in his abortive attempt to adapt Paul de Kruif's The Fight for Life, a radical text that transfigured public health into theological battle. To Scott, the epidemic landscape—pellagra, polio, tuberculosis—was not just medical but moral: a nation that allowed its poor to rot was one already in moral foreclosure. 

Though The March of Time and Pathe News declined his script, deeming it financially impractical, Scott remained undeterred. He saw in de Kruif's maxim (“The relief of suffering and the prevention of dying cannot be best served, for all, as long as there remains any money consideration between the people and the fighters for their lives”) a manifesto. Here lay the germ of all his subsequent work: a cinema of alms, a cinema of resistance.

It is in The Parson of Panamint (1941) that Scott’s ethical architecture first attains cinematic form. Co-credited with Harold Shumate, the film is a western parable masquerading as morality play, and its Christ-figure preacher is unmistakably Scott’s surrogate. 

The parson heals the town’s sinners, exposes its venal capitalists, and is expelled for his trouble—the gospel rewritten as noir. The parallels between this narrative and Scott’s own blacklisting would later seem augural. One scene, in which the parson quotes “He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone,” became eerily prophetic in the wake of the HUAC persecutions.

It was with Mr. Lucky (1943), however, that Scott moved decisively into the realm of A-level studio production. Though the original source was Milton Holmes’s wartime short story Bundles for Freedom, it was Scott who infused the adaptation with moral ballast, anchoring Cary Grant’s gambler-turned-patriot not merely in romantic redemption but in civic duty. 

A fake coin toss with a double-headed coin underscores Scott’s dialectic: the illusion of choice in an age where moral decisions must yield to necessity. That the film climaxes not in combat but in prayerful renewal speaks to Scott's quasi-liturgical understanding of storytelling.

Paramount's Miss Susie Slagle's (1946) followed. Though Scott shared coadaptation credit, his early treatment with Ann Froelick is a strikingly humane attempt to craft a film that would function as a surrogate for the public health documentaries he was never permitted to direct. Clinics, black choirs, racially inclusive ward scenes: these were not background detail but ideological insistence. 

In Scott’s draft, even the eponymous Susie declares, “It is the passionate people who make the world progress. Use your brains, my dears, but never stop thinking with your hearts.” Hollywood, however, diluted the vision. What emerged from Paramount’s machinery was a softened melodrama. The cancer-stricken heroine lived, the black patients vanished, and Scott’s social medicine became cosmetic balm.

Then came Murder, My Sweet (1944). Still, erroneously, attributed chiefly to Dmytryk and Paxton, it was Scott who insisted on the flashback structure and transposed Chandler’s hardboiled interior monologue into first-person narration, preserving a noir sanctity of disillusionment. That the femme fatale Velma is doubled via the transformation of Chandler’s Anne Riordan into Ann Grayle is also Scott’s intervention, infusing the narrative with psychoanalytic echoes.

But it is Crossfire (1947) that marks Scott’s crucifixion. Based on Richard Brooks's The Brick Foxhole, which originally depicted a homophobic killing, Scott’s adaptation, via Paxton, substituted anti-Semitism. In so doing, he risked narrative coherence for moral urgency. To Scott, anti-Semitism was merely the visible edge of fascism’s internal rot. 

As he wrote to RKO executives, “Anti-Semitism and Anti-Negroism will grow unless heroic measures can be undertaken to stop them. This picture is one such measure.” Monty, the murderer, was no aberration but a prototype—a product of militarist obedience, his hatred indistinguishable from patriotism warped into ideology.

HUAC thought otherwise. For having the temerity to imply that American soil could foster fascist spores, Adrian Scott was branded. Fired alongside Edward Dmytryk on 26 November 1947, one day after the infamous Waldorf Statement, Scott became a symbol of Hollywood's autoimmune response to its own conscience. RKO invoked the now-infamous Article 16—a nebulous "morals clause" so elastic it could snap over anything resembling dissent. In truth, his offense had been not conduct but candor.

His last film, So Well Remembered (1948), contains a kind of epilogue to his vision. The protagonist is a doctor who advocates for housing and healthcare—themes now anathema to the rising Cold War consensus. It failed at the box office. Scott’s name would never again appear in American screen credits.

Legal retribution followed. Scott sued RKO for breach of contract, initially winning $84,000 before the ruling was overturned on appeal. He pursued the case until 1957, when the Supreme Court refused to hear it. Dmytryk recanted; Paxton endured; Scott, intransigent, was erased.

copied from Radical Innocence A CRITICAL STUDY OF THE Hollywood Ten by Bernard F. Dick, THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY, 1989, ISBN 0-8131-1660-0

Illness struck next. Anne Shirley, his wife, divorced him over his refusal to cooperate with HUAC. His colitis worsened into hospitalisation. Yet even in exile, he persisted. He married Joan La Cour, a young television writer who first fronted his scripts, then partnered in their authorship. The Scotts relocated to London in 1961, where he worked (uncredited) at MGM's British division. 

Nothing he planned—not even a film with Joseph Losey and Warren Beatty—materialized. His name became a rumour, a memory, a whisper behind other men’s credits.

He did, however, leave behind a final, spectral work: Mr. Lincoln's Whiskers, a gentle one-act play reimagining Grace Bedell's real-life letter to Lincoln. Adapted for television by Paxton in 1969, it aired in 1973, weeks after Scott's death from lung cancer. He never saw it. When Joan informed him that it would be broadcast early, he whispered, simply, "It’s too late."

But it is not. Not quite. In the spring of 1947, Adrian Scott imagined a series of anti-prejudice documentaries, cast not with actors but with volunteers: directors, producers, cinematographers, even stars. Every single person he approached agreed. They agreed not to a film, but to a belief: that cinema, at its apex, was not simply entertainment, but moral weather.

And so, too, was he. A weatherman of storms to come.

A decent man, yes—but more than that, a dangerous one. Dangerous, that is, to the kind of order which prefers its screens anesthetized, its frames empty of conviction, its reels turning toward silence.

Adrian Scott refused that silence. And for it, was silenced himself. Adrian Scott at Wikipedia.

*

THE HOLLYWOOD TEN (1950)

The Full Ten Yards

Full Movie Transcript

The American people are going to have to choose between the Bill of Rights and the Thomas Committee; they cannot have both. One or the other must be abolished in the immediate future. 

These are the Hollywood Ten. In the fall of 1947, they were subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on American Activities, whose chairman was J. Parnell Thomas. They did not behave to Mr. Thomas's satisfaction, and they were declared to be in contempt of Congress. They were tried, declared guilty, and appealed their cases to the higher courts, but their appeal was denied. All ten are now in federal prison serving one-year sentences. 

We should like you to meet them: Albert Maltz, 41 years old, born in Brooklyn, novelist, playwright, writer of short stories and screenplays. His works are read in other countries and have won prizes. The U.S. Army distributed his book to soldiers, and his film "Destination Tokyo" was premiered by the Navy. The Marines praised him for "Pride of the Marines," and the film industry honored his film on racial tolerance. His family will try to weigh these honors while he spends a year in federal prison. 

Lester Cole, born in New York City, 45 years old, was a founding member of the Screenwriters Guild and served as its president and vice president. When he was summoned by the House Committee, he was a valued writer at his film studio, signed to a new contract to write and produce on that very day. He authored 40 screenplays, among them "Romance of Rosy Ridge," "Objective Burma," and "None Shall Escape." He is now in prison. 

Samuel Ornitz, 60 years old, born in New York, is a novelist, screenwriter, lecturer, and scholar. He authored a classical fictional study of American Jewish life, a tender story for children, and a book whose hero was lynched by anti-Catholic bigots. As a social worker, he spent many years with the Prison Association in New York, helping thousands of people get out of prison. He is now in prison himself. 

Adrian Scott, screenwriter and motion picture producer, born in New Jersey, 39 years old, was considered invaluable by his film studio. His films were successful and celebrated, but his film "Crossfire" was not to the taste of J. Parnell Thomas. Now Adrian Scott, too, is in federal prison. 

Alvah Bessie, born in New York, 46 years old, was a newspaperman, novelist, critic, and screenwriter. In 1938, he made his way across the Pyrenees as a volunteer for democracy. On the witness stand in Washington, he said, "I not only supported the Spanish Republic, but it was my high privilege to serve in the ranks of the International Brigades." He returned to the United States to write an account of that war and, in World War II, served as a second lieutenant in the Civil Air Patrol. As a contract writer for Warner Brothers Studios, he is now in prison. 

Edward Dmytryk, 41 years old, was a motion picture director whose films earned him one year in prison for his distinguished contribution to world cinema. 

Ring Lardner Jr., born in Chicago, 34 years old, lost two brothers in the world's struggle for democracy: one as a volunteer in the Loyalist forces in Spain, the other in Germany as an American war correspondent. Lardner authored a dozen screenplays, one of which won the highest award in the film industry. He worked for a trade union to advance equality for all races and nationalities. Ring Lardner Jr. is now a federal prisoner. 

John Howard Lawson, born in New York City, 56 years old, was a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy during World War I and the father of nine plays and many screenplays. Perhaps you remember some of them. A teacher and scholar, Lawson completed the first volume of the history of American culture just before entering prison. His wife and children will wait for him. 

Herbert Biberman, 50 years old, born in Philadelphia, directed plays for the Theatre Guild, the leading theatrical organization in America. He produced and directed films for various motion picture companies and organized the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, one of the first groups to warn the world about Hitlerism. He devoted his energies to decency and humanity, and now he is in federal prison. 

Dalton Trumbo, born in Colorado, 44 years old, is a novelist and pamphleteer in the tradition of Zola and Thoreau. He wrote films such as "Kitty Foyle," "A Guy Named Joe," and "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo." He served as a special consultant at the first United Nations conference in 1945. Five years later, he said goodbye to his family to go to prison. 

Ten men—what was their crime? Why are they in prison? There were two questions: the right of Americans to later secret membership lists has been won in this country at a great cost in blood and hunger. "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?" Unless it has been changed, yesterday in our country we had a secret ballot, and I do not believe this committee has any more right to inquire into my political affiliations than an election official has to examine the ballot marked by the voter.

Thus, J. Parnell Thomas has been put in prison as a common thief, but do the ten belong there? We don't like the idea of going to prison. Our personal lives, our families, and our work are as important to us as to anyone else. 

It is not easy to explain to a child why his father must go to prison. Why didn't we avoid all this and answer the questions, yes or no, as the committee demanded? Because we wanted to challenge the right of the committee to ask such questions. Whose words are these?

"No official, high or petty, may prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein." Supreme Court Justice Jackson wrote this. This was the law of the land until April 10, 1950. On that day, by its refusal to hear our case, the court washed its hands of the rights of the American people—our rights, your rights. And sitting in silence on the bench was the same Mr. Justice Jackson. 

When we appeared before J. Parnell Thomas and his committee, we thought the Constitution guaranteed the rights of everyone. We believed the Supreme Court would certainly stand behind its own decisions. Well, we were mistaken. The committee is now free to operate, to drag before it thousands of people, or the millions it boasts it has on its list.

How are you going to answer the committee's questions? Answer yes or no. Are you a member of the Communist Party or the Progressive Party? Did you ever give a dollar to a loyalist in Spain? Did you ever sign a petition against a certain bill? How will you answer? You can't refuse to answer yes or no. That's contempt; it means a prison sentence for you, just as it does for us. Suppose your answer is yes. It will be smeared all over the front pages of your hometown newspaper. What will happen to your job? And if that's not all, you'll be asked, "Who else was there? Who else is a member?" The next question is, "We want names, places, and people." You want to stay out of trouble? Then become a stool pigeon.

Or suppose you answer no to a question—you're susceptible to perjury. Perjury? What do you mean, perjury? I can prove you're a communist. Louis Budenz will testify. Whittaker Chambers will testify. The Department of Justice has two dozen professional witnesses who travel around the country proving nothing else but those lies. Sure, Whittaker Chambers is a liar, yet Alger Hiss got five years. Don't you see? 

These investigations are actually traps. You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. It's a form of legal lynching, and this is the kind of lynching the Supreme Court refused to stop. We are aware of a developing nightmare of fear in our land, in which increasing numbers of citizens are being forced to swear, "I am not this, I am not that, I don't belong to anything, I don't believe in anything, I don't criticize anything." Loyalty oaths and loyalty boards, and nobody is loyal who criticizes the bipartisan foreign policy. Force controls the university campuses, teachers are being fired, film studios are enlisting in the Cold War, labor leaders are being framed on perjured testimony, and lawyers are sent to prison for defending their clients. The reputation, career, and liberty of any citizen are at the mercy of the professional stool pigeon. Yes, government by stool pigeon, everybody investigating everybody else. And for this, on April 24, 1950, President Truman claimed credit, boasting in a public speech that his administration had convicted citizens of contempt for refusing to testify before congressional committees. Not just one court or one committee, not just the Department of Justice but the State Department, not just the Supreme Court but the President himself. Why? Why? Could it be the Cold War's responsibility? Is it possible that, under the pretext of the Cold War, civil rights are being taken from the American people? Some of the very people who would have to fight and die in such a war will have no say in whether to go to war or not. 

There are many problems in our relations with the Soviet Union, but should people who say, "No, there must be a way to peace," be investigated, smeared, blacklisted, and sent to prison? When we were asked, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" the committee was really preparing to ask you, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party the committee was really preparing to ask you are you now or have you ever been in favor of peace who is loyal to this land those who want to settle world problems with the hydrogen bomb we feel that the question of peace and war of devastated cities of millions of dead Americans is too important to be left to the generals or in the hands of the Committee on American activities in 1859 Abraham Lincoln said but people are the rightful masters of the congress’s and the courts we believe this and for asserting that belief before a congressional committee ten of us are going to prison casualties of the cold war how many more will there be there need be no more that depends on you truly it depends on you truly it depends on you.

Edward Dmytryk: The Director Who Named Names

Edward Dmytryk, born in 1908 in Canada, had a much different upbringing from Scott. Raised by a strict and often abusive father, Dmytryk ran away from home at 14 and began working as a messenger at Paramount Pictures. 

He worked his way up through the studio system, eventually becoming a director. By the early 1940s, Dmytryk had established himself as a versatile filmmaker, directing films across a range of genres. His early works included the 1943 melodrama Tender Comrade, written by fellow Communist and blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo, and the political docudrama Hitler’s Children (1943).

Dmytryk’s most notable work, however, came in his partnership with Adrian Scott. Together, they crafted some of the defining films of the film noir genre, including Murder, My Sweet, Cornered, and Crossfire. Dmytryk’s directorial vision, combined with Scott’s production sensibilities, resulted in a series of socially conscious thrillers that were both artistically and politically significant.

Like Scott, Dmytryk was called before HUAC in 1947 for his Communist Party membership, which he had joined in 1945. Initially, Dmytryk stood alongside the Hollywood Ten in refusing to cooperate with the committee, and he too was sentenced to prison for contempt of Congress. However, Dmytryk’s time in prison led him to reconsider his stance. He came to the realization that in order to continue working in Hollywood, he would need to cooperate with HUAC.

In 1951, Dmytryk returned to the HUAC hearings, but this time he testified as a friendly witness, naming over two dozen individuals, including his former friend and collaborator Adrian Scott. Dmytryk’s decision to testify drew harsh criticism from his former colleagues, many of whom saw it as a betrayal. In his 1978 memoir, It’s a Hell of a Life, but Not a Bad Living, Dmytryk defended his actions, arguing that the Hollywood establishment was bent on retribution and that there was no escaping their demands for cooperation. He contended that his decision to name names was not a moral failure, but a pragmatic one, allowing him to continue his career in an unforgiving political climate.

The consequences of HUAC’s actions were starkly different for Scott and Dmytryk. After serving his prison sentence, Scott struggled to find work in Hollywood. His wife, Joan Scott, played a pivotal role in helping him survive professionally, fronting for him under the pseudonym Joanne Court on projects such as Lassie and Have Gun – Will Travel. Over time, Joan herself became an accomplished television writer, but Adrian Scott’s career never recovered from the blacklist. He continued to write, often without credit, for British television, but he never again reached the heights of his pre-HUAC success. Adrian Scott passed away in 1973, his career permanently marred by the blacklist.

Dmytryk, on the other hand, was quickly able to reintegrate into Hollywood after his cooperation with HUAC. Producer Stanley Kramer hired him to direct The Sniper (1952), a psychological thriller, and other notable projects followed, including The Caine Mutiny (1954), which earned Dmytryk critical acclaim. Dmytryk worked steadily throughout the 1950s and 1960s, though by the 1970s, work had dried up. In his later years, he transitioned to teaching film at universities. Dmytryk attempted to rehabilitate his legacy through his 1996 memoir Odd Man Out: A Memoir of the Hollywood Ten, in which he shifted blame for the fallout of HUAC onto his former colleagues.

Hollywood Ten leaflet. 1950.

Issued by the Arts, Sciences and Professions Council.

In the spring of 1947 the House Committee on Un-American Activities (better known as the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC) began conducting a well-publicized investigation of Communists in the motion picture industry. By the fall, they were ready to hold public hearings. The American public paid close attention as a string of well-known stars, producers, writers, and directors were called to Washington, D.C., and grilled.

Pauling knew many of them through his work with ICCASP. At least one of them he considered a friend: Dalton Trumbo, "one of the most gifted writers in Hollywood," as Pauling described him. Trumbo refused to cooperate with HUAC’s investigation. Instead of answering questions, he submitted a written statement in which he described an atmosphere "acrid with fear and suppression" created by HUAC and other investigatory committees. Washington, D.C., he wrote, had become "a city in which old friends hesitate to recognize each other in public places; a city in which men and women who dissent even slightly from the orthodoxy you seek to impose, speak with confidence only in moving cars and the open air." When Trumbo tried to read his statement aloud, he was gaveled down. After the hearings, he and nine other non-cooperators were singled out for further legal action. They would become known as the Hollywood Ten.

This Hollywood Ten Leaflet is here.