Hollywood blacklisting of the 1950s
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Fully: Red panic on the silver screen The infamous Hollywood blacklisting of the 1950s
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Red panic on the silver screen: The infamous Hollywood blacklisting of the 1950s
Blacklisting isn’t something that happens in Hollywood all that often anymore – although Mel Gibson would probably beg to differ – but it is a fate to have befallen many stars over the years after it was decided their off-camera antics made them persona non grata in industry circles.
Very rarely is it politically motivated, though, with the infamous era of Communist panic standing out as the entire entertainment industry turning on its own and attempting to banish them based entirely on their leanings. In some cases, they were nothing more than unfounded and unproven accusations, but they still had the potential to derail an entire career through association.
In late 1947, the threat of Communism was already looming large over American society at large, but it generated more tabloid inches than ever before in the wake of the ‘Hollywood Ten’. The House Un-American Activities Committee issued 79 subpoenas demanding the answer to questions about their perceived ties to the movement, and only ten of them appeared in person.
Just like that, they were out on their arses, with a purge waiting in the wings to root out any party members or sympathisers. It wasn’t against the law to be a member of the Communist Party, but that didn’t prevent the hearings from painting anyone who had even the slightest connections to be an undesirable figure.
Walt Disney was leading the charge after testifying that he was convinced Communism was on the cusp of posing a serious threat to the industry, while Screen Actors Guild head Ronald Reagan got in on the act decades before he used much the same rhetoric during his time in office as the president of the United States.
Big names, including John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Judy Garland, tried to mount a counter-offensive of sorts, but it didn’t last very long. By November of 1947, the blacklist was in full effect when the ‘Hollywood Ten’ were cited for contempt of Congress after refusing to answer questions on their alleged Communist inclinations.
It was never proven by evidentiary means that Tinseltown was a hotbed for Communist propaganda, but the spiralling situation encouraged RKO Pictures owner Floyd Odlum to abandon the business before his replacement Howard Hughes mothballed the studio for six months and ditched almost the entirety of the payroll as he conducted his own investigation into who may or may not be a damned Commie.
(Credit: Alamy)
The ‘Hollywood Ten’ were convicted and sentenced to one-year prison terms, with member Edward Dmytryk being granted an early release on the promise of giving evidence against known sympathisers. Suspiciously, his career gradually returned to its former position of prominence, but the other nine weren’t quite as fortunate.
The publication of Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television in 1950 furthered the agenda, with over 150 names being made public alongside detailed records claiming to outline their support of the movement. People lost their jobs, found themselves on the fringes, and struggled to repair their tattered reputations based entirely on the information being peddled by a right-wing journal.
A second investigation in 1951 sought to uncover even more dirt, with more aggressive tactics being used as the witch-hunt continued unabated. Taking the Fifth Amendment and staying silent was tantamount to an admission of guilt, with dozens of careers being destroyed along the way as friends turned on friends, peers turned on peers, and anyone with an axe to grind suddenly found themselves with the power to mount an allegation that had the potential to ruin somebody’s livelihood, regardless of how deeply it was or wasn’t rooted in fact.
The panic ran rampant throughout Hollywood for years until Jules Dassin’s 1956 film Rififi spent 20 weeks playing in cinemas to push the door ever so slightly open. Resistance continued to build as Alfred Hitchcock hired blacklisted star Norman Lloyd, composer Jerry Fielding returned to television at the insistance of Betty Hutton, and Trumbo ditched the pseodonyms to write Otto Preminger’s Exodus and Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus. The latter was his first credit in ten years, with Kirk Douglas one of the screenwriter’s foremost and most vocal backers.
The blacklist may have been rendered obsolete by the dawn of the 1960s, but the reverberations continued to be felt around Hollywood for years to come, and it remains one of the mainstream media’s most unsavoury periods.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/infamous-hollywood-blacklisting-of-the-1950s/