Trumbo got his pen
Trumbo’s novel depicting the horrors of war through a soldier who has lost his arms, legs, and all of his face, received the National Book Award as the “Most Original Book of 1939“ and sold well, but Trumbo stopped publication of the book during World War II, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.
John Wayne famously called High Noon “the most un-American thing I’ve seen in my whole life”
The
film, written and co-produced by Carl Foreman, premiered on July 24, 1952 in
New York City. Foreman
was called before the House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) during production., admitting being a member of the Communist Party in the early
1940s, but refused to provide names of
other members and then fled to England (where he wrote The Bridge on the River Kwai).
High
Noon was
nominated for 7 Academy Awards, and received 4 (Best Actor, Best Editing, Best
Score, Best Song). John Wayne accepted the Best Actor Award for the absent Gary
Cooper and said that he was going to ask his “business manager, agent, and
producer and writers” and find out why “I didn’t get High Noon and Coop did.”
In fact, Wayne was offered the film first, but refused, as he believed
“Foreman’s story was an obvious allegory against blacklisting.”
Hollywood Hero:Thomas Leo McCarey
Thomas Leo McCarey (October 3,
1898 – July 5, 1969) was a three-time Academy Award winning film director, screenwriter
and producer who was involved in the production of over 200 films including:
Duck Soup
Make Way for Tomorrow
The Awful Truth
Going My Way
The Bells of St. Mary's
My Son John
McCarey testified as a friendly
witness early on in the hearings of the Un-American Activities Committee in Congress
and made the popular anti-communist film My Son John (1952) and the equally anti-communist films Satan
Never Sleeps (1962)
Johannes Eisler, spy
Johannes Eisler’s brother, Gerhart,
was a Communist journalist and his sister, Elfriede, was a leader of the German
Communist Party in the mid-1920s. At age 14 Eisler joined a socialist youth
group (His sister later moved to the US turned into an anti-communist, writing
books against her former political affiliation, and even testifying against her
brothers before the House Un-American Activities Committee.)
Eisler arrived in the US in 1938. B y
the early 1940s he was composing with Bertolt Brecht in Hollywood as well as music
for various documentary films and for eight Hollywood film scores, two of which
— Hangmen Also Die! and None but the Lonely Heart — were nominated for Oscars
in 1944 and 1945. From 1927 to the end of his life, Eisler wrote the music for
40 films, making film music the largest part of his compositions after vocal
music for chorus and/or solo voices.
From 1943 onwards, the FBI would keep
Eisler under almost total surveillance as his over-six-hundred-page FBI file
attests. In 1946, Eisler and his brother Gerhart, a functionary of the KPD, who
had been in America since 1941 were the subject of a furious press campaign.
Eisler was called before the Committee to find that he had been denounced by
none other than his own sister Elfriede, now using the name Ruth Fischer. She
also began taking out full-page ads in newspapers across the country accusing
her brother Gerhart of having murdered Soviet politician Nikolai Bukharin and
of being a nuclear spy for the Soviet Union.
Eisler was interviewed twice by the
House Committee on Un-American Activities, who suspected him to be the chief
Soviet agent in Hollywood. Perhaps the most powerful moment of Eisler’s
testimony was when he faced repeated questioning as to whether he was
officially a Communist Party member. He stated passionately that “The
Communists have sacrificed so much and fought so heroically, I would be a
swindler if I called myself a Communist, I have no right to say this, the
Communist underground workers in every country, they are heroes! I am not a
hero I am a composer.”
Charlie Chaplin, Igor Stravinsky,
Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein—organized benefit concerts to raise money
for his defense fund, but he was deported early in 1948. He died in 1963,
however was never Blacklisted ad continued to sell his works until 1961.
1962Esther (TV
Movie)
1962The Life of
Galileo (TV Movie)
1961Aktion J
(Documentary)
1961Schweyk im zweiten
Weltkrieg (TV Movie)
1960Herr Puntila
and His Servant Matti
1960The
Opportunists
1958Geschwader
Fledermaus
1957Katzgraben
1957The Crucible
1956Night and Fog
(Documentary short)
1955Bel Ami
1955Bel-Ami Der
Frauenheld von Paris
1954Schicksal am
Lenkrad (as Hans Eisler)
1952Frauenschicksale
1952KrÃzová trojka
1951Wilhelm Pieck -
Das Leben unseres Präsidenten (Documentary)
1950Der Rat der
Götter
1949Our Daily Bread
Philip Loeb killed himself
On September 1, 1955, actor and director Philip
Loeb took a room at the Taft Hotel at 50th and Seventh Avenue in
Manhattan under the name “Fred Lange” which means “a long peace in German, and
ended his life with an overdose of 36 sleeping pills.
In April 1952, four years before Loeb
took his own life, director Elia Kazan named Loeb as a communist in his
testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Kazan and Lee J.
Cobb gave information on his radical political activity in the 1930s. Cobb
testified that he did not know if Loeb was a former member of the American
Communist Party but he accused him of working with Sam Jaffe to control a
left-wing caucus in the Actors Equity Association.
Supposedly Loeb was blacklisted due
to Kazan’s testimony and unable to find work. But he had actually been named as
a communist in the June 1950 edition of Red
Channels, in a section called “The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and
Television”
Loeb denied being a Communist. The
studios and the networks wanted him gone because for them, he was a trouble maker,
a strong union advocate who had fought to get rehearsal pay and better salaries
for all actors. The FBI had determined that although Loeb leaned extremely far
left, he had never been a communist.
At the time, Loeb was at the height
of his popularity starring in The Goldberg’s a TV smash hit. (Where he made $20,000 a year)
General Foods, the sponsors of The Goldberg’s, insisted that he be dropped from
the show's cast. The producer refused to
fire Loeb so CBS dropped the program which was immediately picked up by NBC,
with the condition that Loeb be replaced. Loeb resigned
on his own and left the show with a settlement of almost $400,000 at a time
when a healthy years income for a family of three was $3,300.
Loeb landed the lead role in the Broadway production of
"Time Out for Ginger". Being named a communist and leaving his TV
show with a half a million dollars didn’t cause Loeb to kill himself. He was
badly despondent of his wife’s recent death, his own health was failing rapidly,
and his adult son’s mental health was growing steadily worse. (He was delusional
and saw communist spies everywhere, all of whom intended to kill him.) His sons
hospitalization cost him $12,000 a year.
The week before he killed himself, the State
of new York sent Loeb a summons to
account for $1,000 in back taxes. Loeb
responded that he had less than $220.00 in the back, which seems highly unlikely.
friend of the court
[Norman Mailer] was hoping to have
many of the most important people in Hollywood sign an amicus curiae—friend of
the court—brief, which could be presented with an appeal to the Supreme Court
before the Hollywood Ten were put in jail like common criminals by HUAC. His
speech was wonderful, and everyone in the room was shoving money at him.
Shelley [Winters] and I each gave him a check for $100 and ran to get the car
because we were late for dinner.
After an exhaustive campaign, Shelley
finally succeeded in getting George Stevens to give her a screen test for A
Place in the Sun. She called Norman the night before the test and asked if they
could have dinner. She desperately needed to pick his brains because she had
not done her homework. She had not read Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, on which
the movie was based. Her justification for this laziness was that an important
American writer could give her insights she might overlook on her own. She went
to Norman’s house, and they spent the evening discussing the story and her
character. Whatever he told her must have helped, because she got the part. As
she was leaving Norman’s, he gave her back the checks we had written at the
Kellys’ and told her he had torn up the brief. He had wanted to get some
blockbuster names that evening, but she and I were the only ones who signed it.
He didn’t deposit our checks, either. Everyone else had donated cash.“— Farley Granger, Include Me Out.
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