Walter Bernstein, Celebrated Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101
Walter Bernstein, Celebrated
Screenwriter, Is Dead at 101
His movies included “Fail
Safe,” “Paris Blues” and, perhaps most notably, “The Front,” based on his own
experience of being blacklisted.
By John Anderson
- Jan. 23, 2021
Walter Bernstein, whose career as a top
film and television screenwriter was derailed by the McCarthy-era blacklist,
and who decades later turned that experience into one of his best-known films,
“The Front,” died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 101.
His wife, Gloria Loomis, said the cause
was pneumonia.
Described in a 2014 Esquire profile as
a “human Energizer bunny,” Mr. Bernstein was writing, teaching and generating
screenplay ideas well into his 90s. Until recently, he had several projects in
development. He created the BBC mystery mini-series “Hidden” in 2011, and he
was an adjunct instructor of dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch
School of the Arts until he retired in 2017. “They’ll carry me off writing,” he
told Variety.
Mr.
Bernstein’s politics — he called himself a “secular, self-loving Jew of a
leftist persuasion” — influenced both his life and his art.
“Fail-Safe”
(1964), the story of an accidental nuclear crisis starring Henry Fonda in an
adaptation of the Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler novel, was a bold rejoinder
to the Cold War arms race. “Paris Blues” (1961), which Mr. Bernstein wrote for
the director Martin Ritt, a fellow blacklist victim and frequent collaborator,
starred Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman as expatriate American jazz musicians
and delivered pointed commentary on racial intolerance. “The Molly Maguires”
(1970), also directed by Mr. Ritt, concerned union-busting in the coal mines of
19th-century Pennsylvania, mirroring the social upheavals of the late 1960s and
’70s.
The subject of “The Front” (1976), also
directed by Mr. Ritt and the only film for which Mr. Bernstein received an
Academy Award nomination, was the blacklist itself: Woody Allen starred as a
“front,” a stand-in for a writer who, like Mr. Bernstein, had been blacklisted.
(Mr. Bernstein made a cameo appearance that same year in Mr. Allen’s “Annie
Hall.”)
Not all Mr. Bernstein’s subjects were
political. The football-themed “Semi-Tough,” starring Burt Reynolds, Jill
Clayburgh and Kris Kristofferson and based on a novel by Dan Jenkins, lampooned
the New Age spirituality of such ’70s movements as EST. “Yanks,” starring
Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave, explored the romantic entanglements and
cultural differences between American troops and local Englishwomen during
World War II. Mr. Bernstein’s lone feature film as a director was a comedy,
“Little Miss Marker,” a 1980 version of the oft-filmed Damon Runyon story that
starred Walter Matthau and Julie Andrews.
A Hollywood Education
Walter Bernstein was born in Brooklyn
on Aug. 20, 1919, to Louis and Hannah (Bistrong) Bernstein, Eastern European
immigrants. His parents were “not really affected by the Depression,” Mr.
Bernstein recalled in his autobiography, “Inside Out” (1996), because his
father, a schoolteacher, was protected by Civil Service employment rules.
Walter attended Erasmus High School in Flatbush, which was so crowded, the
students were split into three shifts — a boon for the film-loving Walter. When
he was on the 6:30-to-noon shift, he could catch matinees next door at the
Astor Theater, where daytime admission was a dime.
On
graduation, Mr. Bernstein accepted what he called a “wild, dubious” gift from
his father: six months of an intensive language course at the University of
Grenoble in France. His father, who knew a French family Walter could stay
with, “had aspirations for me I did not share,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, adding,
“If I had a choice of where to go for six months it would have been Hollywood.”
But he went, and the experience
broadened him, thrusting him into the midst of young, often Communist
intellectuals living on a continent where Hitler, war and Marxism were the
currency of conversation.
Returning to the United States, he
attended Dartmouth College, where he became the film critic for the campus
newspaper The Daily Dartmouth, a job that came with a pass for the local
cinema. “The only catch,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, “was that there were no
screenings or previews, so you had to write the review before seeing the
movie.”
“I found this no real impediment,” he
added. “Anyone could review a movie after seeing it; that was mere criticism.
Doing it this way made it art.”
He also contributed to The New Yorker,
and would continue to do so during and after World War II before becoming a
staff writer for the magazine.
First,
however, there was the war to get through. Shortly after graduating from
Dartmouth, he was drafted and sent to Fort Benning, Ga., where in 1941, during
the relatively relaxed period before Pearl Harbor, soldiers staged a show
titled “Grin and Bear It,” written by Mr. Bernstein. (“It wasn’t very good,” he
recalled, “but it was a show.”)
“Brooks Atkinson was coming down from
The Times to see it,” he said, “and John O’Hara, who was the reviewer for
Newsweek. It was a big thing. We were supposed to open on Dec. 10.” On Dec. 7,
the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
“One of the actors said, ‘Now we’re not
going to get the critics,’” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “And we didn’t.”
Making Wartime News
While contributing military-themed
articles to The New Yorker, Mr. Bernstein, who eventually attained the rank of
sergeant, became a globe-trotting correspondent for the Army journal Yank, a
job that lasted throughout the war. It was for Yank that he got the scoop that
would give him his first taste of fame.
“Army Writer Also Sees Tito but Censors
Stop His Story” read the May 20, 1944, Associated Press headline: Mr.
Bernstein, defying military protocol, had been spirited into Yugoslavia by
anti-German partisans and given the first interview with Marshal Josep Broz,
known as Tito, the Communist leader who would head the postwar Yugoslav
republic until his death in 1980.
“I was the first Western correspondent
to see him,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “The Allies were planning to send in a
couple of reporters from the pool and photographers, but the military wanted to
delay any news about Tito till after the Second Front opened; the partisans
wanted the opposite. They wanted publicity.”
Although
his interview with Tito was temporarily quashed, the Associated Press article
made it world news.
“I had an aunt who was a charter member
of the Communist Party; she worked for the party as a stenographer or something
like that,” Mr. Bernstein said in 2010 in an interview for this obituary. “And
when I came back from the war, she asked me if I would talk to some Communist
functionaries. I said that was all right with me. They wanted to know about
Tito; nobody was telling them anything. And I told them about my adventures.”
“I didn’t join the party until after
the war,” Mr. Bernstein said, although the events of the ’30s, including the
Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe, made the
Communist cause attractive to him. “The Communists,” he said, “seemed like they
were doing something.”
In 1947, with his Yank and New Yorker
experience under his belt, a well-received collection of his war stories (“Keep
Your Head Down”) on bookshelves and a hankering to get into movies, Mr.
Bernstein went to Hollywood. He had been offered a contract with the
writer-producer Robert Rossen at Columbia Pictures, where he did uncredited
work on “All the King’s Men.”
He ended up staying in Hollywood for
six months: His agent, Harold Hecht, had formed what would be a prolific
production partnership with the actor Burt Lancaster and “offered me a job for
twice what I was getting,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, “which still wasn’t much.”
That
led to his first Hollywood credit, “Kiss the Blood Off My Hands” (1948), a crime
drama starring Mr. Lancaster and Joan Fontaine. But by this time the blacklist
was starting to make itself felt within an industry where left-wing political
sentiments had previously been both common and tolerated..
Suddenly Untouchable
“I was still in Hollywood in 1947,
during the Hollywood Ten,” Mr. Bernstein said, referring to the prosecution of
writers, producers and directors who had appeared before the House Un-American
Activities Committee and refused to answer questions about their Communist
affiliations. “I was working for Rossen, who was a Communist. At first it was
the Hollywood 19, then it was cut down to 10. I don’t know why. Rossen was very
upset that he hadn’t made the cut.”
No one took the hearings seriously at
first, but they soon would. Mr. Bernstein was considered untouchable both in
Hollywood and in the fledgling television industry in New York once his name
had appeared in “Red Channels,” an anti-Communist tract published in 1950 by
the right-wing journal Counterattack.
“I
was listed right after Lenny Bernstein,” Mr. Bernstein recalled. “There were
about eight listings for me, and they were all true.” He had indeed written for
the leftist New Masses, been a member of the Communist Party and supported
Soviet relief, the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and civil rights.
Mr. Bernstein and other blacklisted
writers were forced to work under assumed names for sympathetic filmmakers like
Sidney Lumet, who used Mr. Bernstein, now back in New York, throughout the ’50s
on “You Are There,” the CBS program hosted by Walter Cronkite that re-enacted
great moments in history.
It
was during this period that Mr. Bernstein and his colleagues, notably the
writers Abraham Polonsky and Arnold Manoff, began the ruse of protecting their
anonymity by sending stand-ins to represent them at meetings with producers, a
ploy later dramatized in “The Front.” (In addition to Mr. Allen, the movie
starred Zero Mostel, who, like the film’s director, Mr. Ritt, had also been
blacklisted.)
“Suddenly, the blacklist had achieved
for the writer what he had previously only aspired to,” Mr. Bernstein joked in
“Inside Out.” “He was considered necessary.”
It was the now largely forgotten “That
Kind of Woman” (1959), with Sophia Loren, that restarted Mr. Bernstein’s
“official” career. The film’s director was Mr. Lumet, who hired Mr. Bernstein
under his own name, thus effectively restoring him to the ranks of the
employable.
In the years following the blacklist,
Mr. Bernstein worked regularly for Hollywood, although he continued to live in
New York. Among his film credits were the westerns “The Wonderful Country”
(1959) and “Heller in Pink Tights” (1960), the Harold Robbins adaptation “The
Betsy” (1978) and the Dan Aykroyd-Walter Matthau comedy “The Couch Trip”
(1988). He received an Emmy nomination for the television drama “Miss Evers’
Boys” (1997), based on the true story of a 1932 government experiment in which
Black test subjects were allowed to die of syphilis, and wrote the teleplay for
the live broadcast of “Fail-Safe” in 2000.
In addition to his wife, a literary
agent, Mr. Bernstein is survived by a daughter, Joan Bernstein, and a son,
Peter Spelman, from his first marriage, to Marva Spelman, which ended in
divorce; three sons, Nicholas, Andrew and Jake, from his third marriage, to
Judith Braun, which also ended in divorce, as did a brief second marriage; his
stepdaughter, Diana Loomis; five grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and a
sister, Marilyn Seide.
Six decades after the fact, Mr.
Bernstein voiced a warmly nostalgic view of the Red Scare period, an era that
has become synonymous with intolerance and fear.
“I
don’t know if it’s true of other people getting older,” he said, “but I look
back on that period with some fondness in a way, in terms of the relationships
and support and friendships. We helped each other during that period. And in a
dog-eat-dog business, it was quite rare.”
Paul McGrath, a
Paul McGrath, actor: McGrath was identified as a communist by Red
Channels but it had no effect on his busy career.
Evidence found on the Maryland farm of Whittaker Chambers,
"Washington: Evidence found on the Maryland farm of Whittaker Chambers, forging a new link in the chain of spy data, is examined by Congressman Nixon and Chief Investigator Stribling of the House Un-American Activities Caommittee. The film may answer a lot of questions the country is asking." - Nixon looks at microfilm, the so-called pumpkin papers, Chambers says "Hiss is lying", pictures of pumpkin patch (no sound) (partial newsreel).
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