Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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Part II
HOLLYWOOD IN
TRANSITION, 1949–1974
115
The year 1948 was a turning point for Hollywood because the Supreme
Court’s Paramount Decision declared illegal the vertical integration of the five
most prosperous and stable of the major Hollywood companies. That ruling
was important because it meant the end of the economic structure on which
Hollywood’s financial success had been based for nearly three decades. The
Court’s decision that Hollywood’s business practices were monopolistic meant
the demise of a structure that had ensured high-quality screen entertainment
for America’s mass audiences since the 1920s.
A year earlier, in 1947, the federal government had appeared to inter-
vene in Hollywood in yet a different manner that many in Hollywood feared
threatened basic rights of free speech and artistic expression. During autumn
of that year, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of the
U.S. House of Representatives held hearings to investigate Communist Party
infiltration in the motion picture industry. Although many other people in
the movie industry thought that this was primarily a political sideshow devised
to draw attention to governmental vigilance against the global Communist
menace and to earn publicity for the congressmen who were members of the
committee, others took the investigations seriously indeed.
On one side were those who thought that the activities of Communists
in Hollywood were threatening to the industry, tended to aid and abet a global
enemy of the United States, and might influence the production of movies
with pro-Communist and anti-American content. On the other side were
those who believed that Congress had no business conducting such investiga-
tions and that the political beliefs and affiliations of any American—including
those involved in making movies—was a matter of personal conscience and
a right protected by the Constitution of the United States. Although these
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Postwar Unravelings
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hearings—and the subsequent convictions for contempt of Congress of ten
Hollywood figures, primarily screenwriters—are often said to be the result
of “McCarthyism,” in actuality Joseph McCarthy, the U.S. senator from
Wisconsin who later conducted investigations into Communist infiltration of
the U.S. State Department and the Department of the Army, had nothing to
do with hearings on Communists in the entertainment industry. A bipartisan
panel from the House of Representatives conducted these Hollywood hear-
ings, not the U.S. Senate.
The HUAC hearings featured a number of friendly witnesses, including
one of the Warner brothers, Jack, along with Louis B. Mayer and actors Rob-
ert Montgomery, Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, Gary Cooper, and Ron-
ald Reagan. In addition, Walt Disney and the veteran director at Paramount
and MGM Leo McCarey were cofounders of the Alliance for the Preservation
of American Ideals in 1944, and both of them testified as well. All of these
figures provided general support to the hearings, along with specific testimony
about movie industry personnel whom they considered suspicious.
At the time, much of the impetus to “name names” and testify against
the activities of Communist Party members, extreme leftists, and Stalinists
working in the movie industry came from the tensions in a number of the
movie industry’s unions and guilds. These conflicts were often within unions
in battles for influence and control, such as the Screen Actors Guild, the Con-
ference of Studio Unions, and the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage
Employees. Most of the friendly witnesses took the position that indeed there
were Communists in the industry, a number of whom were especially active
in union agitation, but that, on the whole, they had been thwarted in their
attempts to take over the industry.
In 1947, eleven witnesses who were suspected Communists were called
to testify. One of them, Bertolt Brecht, told HUAC he had never been a
Communist—which was a lie—and then promptly left the United States for
his native Europe. The other ten refused to answer questions, asserted their
unwillingness to cooperate, and engaged in tirades against the committee that
the congressmen called obstructive. All ten were subsequently cited for con-
tempt of Congress. They were screenwriters Alvah Bessie, Lester Cole, Ring
Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, and Dalton
Trumbo, directors Herbert Biberman and Edward Dmytrk, and producer
Adrian Scott. When they were indicted for contempt of Congress, the major
studios, acting through the industry’s trade organization, the Motion Picture
Producers Association, issued a joint declaration that they would not know-
ingly employ Communists. The Screen Actors Guild, to the chagrin of several
other industry unions, endorsed the producers’ position.
Postwar Unravelings 117
Eventually, the ten were convicted, and six served jail time. To clarify,
they were not imprisoned for being Communist Party members, nor for any
ideas they held, but rather for belligerently refusing to cooperate and answer the
questions posed to them by an investigative committee legally created by an act
of Congress, so that their violation of the law was “contempt of Congress.”
Closer to the actual events, realistic interpretations of the motives and facts
underlying these congressional investigations and the creation of the “blacklist”
appear to have prevailed. After the late 1960s, as far-reaching cultural changes
occurred in the United States, there was a shift, especially in Hollywood it-
self, toward seeing the “Hollywood Ten” as victims. They were subsequently
lionized in articles, books, and documentary films, as well as in a number of
sympathetic feature films set in the era. It is difficult to know whether the ten
were maligned heroes defending the principles of free speech and assembly or
naïve intellectuals and artists drawn to the ideas of the radical left.
The motives of the movie companies that created the blacklist, as well
as the motives of the friendly witnesses who testified—often about the past
activities of old friends—were complex. Was such testimony a payback for
personal antagonism, perhaps exacerbated by conflicts within the guilds and
unions, or was it testimony by people who held a genuine fear of Stalin’s
Soviet Union, its murderous record of denying human rights, and its expan-
sion into Eastern Europe? How deeply did the friendly witnesses believe that
some professionals working within Hollywood were blind devotees of Stalinist
ideology, and that the American Communist Party was largely funded from
Moscow, so that their loyalty to the United States should be questioned in an
era of global conflict? For the next several years, HUAC hearings, the divisions
in Hollywood over them, the existence of the blacklist, and the debate over
ideas, ideologies, and political activities and their relationship to moviemaking
held some prominence in Hollywood’s culture.
Moviemaking in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, like every-
thing else in America, continued alongside the Cold War. Did many movies
allude to that prolonged conflict, either directly or indirectly? Later genera-
tions of movie critics and historians sometimes would assert that trends in the
American cinema of the 1950s, such as the appearance of science-fiction
movies in the period, were emblematic of the fear of atomic weapons and the
challenge that existed over such weapons between the United States and the
Soviet Union. Other commentators would caution that science-fiction movies
had their best audiences among teenagers, who are the least likely group in
society to be interested in politics. Did the investigative hearings of HUAC
and the blacklist cast a cloud of intimidation over Hollywood that discouraged
producers, screenwriters, and directors from tackling movies that dealt with
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social injustice or that suggested solutions which were too clearly identified as
being on the political left? None of these questions is easily answered.
The general tendency of Hollywood after 1948 was to try to bring back
the old audiences of pre-1948 to the movie theaters. Mostly, this was done
by reworking established stories, formulas, and the themes of Classic Holly-
wood, but with added new approaches bringing the aesthetics of realism and
naturalism on the screen. Were those tendencies shifted toward the avoidance
of more politically and socially engaged movies because of governmental pres-
sures on suspected Communists in the early years of the Cold War? Perhaps,
but it is difficult to document such a link convincingly.
INTERNATIONAL CREDITS AND A COLD WAR BACKDROP
The Cold War and the U.S.-Soviet conflict, of course, could serve as the
background for many a spy movie, a thriller, or even a comedy during the era
of Hollywood’s transition from 1949 to 1974. In the case of The Third Man,
the setting and the suspense were provided by immediate postwar Vienna and
underscored by the emerging Cold War tensions. Strictly speaking, the screen
adaptation of Graham Greene’s thriller might be classified as a British movie,
because the movie’s producer, Alexander Korda, and its director, Sir Carol
Reed, were British, but the fact that The Third Man film required American
financing, and that its two male stars were American, sufficed to qualify it as
an American movie.
In the movie, a writer of pulp novels named Holly Martins (Joseph Cot-
ten) is on the trail of his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in postwar
Vienna, ruled by the victorious World War II allies—the Soviet Union, the
United States, Great Britain, and France. Lime has become a black marketer,
peddling diluted penicillin, which, when used, proved deadly. Martins arrives
in Vienna only to find his friend Lime assumed dead, and a trail of corruption
spiraling all across the four occupation zones of Vienna with Lime’s signature
on it. Broke, confused, and alone, Martins is forced to confront his idealism
and innocence about Lime and to explore the boundaries of an old friendship.
Martins’s odyssey in search of the truth eventually destroys his oldest friend,
the woman they both love, and Martin himself.
Director Reed and his cinematographer Robert Krasker created unusual
combinations of lighting and camera angles that convey the confusion and
escalating panic of Martins as he tries to track down Lime. According to the
assistant director on the project, Guy Hamilton (who later directed several of
the early and classic James Bond movies in the 1960s), the distinctive ways
Postwar Unravelings 119
in which shadows of Lime’s figure are used was a discovery born of unusual
circumstance: While waiting for Orson Welles to work out the finances of his
deal and to actually arrive in Vienna to begin filming, Hamilton himself was
sent down streets dressed in a big hat and a topcoat, while Reed and Krasker
simply observed. Out of their observations came the decision to try to capture
on film the look of the shadow projected by Welles’s Lime, which became the
visual signature of The Third Man.
Working through the British producer Korda, a deal was set up with
Hollywood’s premier independent producer, David O. Selznick, for financ-
ing the movie. Selznick, naturally, got the film he wanted. In fact, he cut
eleven minutes from the version Reed delivered to him in order to get to
the length of the print released into distribution in the United States. There
was Cold War intrigue behind the film’s plot as well is in the screenplay. It
was credibly speculated that the writer Greene, who had served in the Brit-
ish Intelligence unit MI6 during World War II, had based the Lime character
on Greene’s own suspicions about his wartime boss in British intelligence,
Kim Philby. Philby, as it turned out later, actually was a double agent, work-
ing the Soviet KGB.
Along with Welles and his longtime friend and colleague, Joseph Cotten,
the British actors Alida Valli and Trevor Howard joined an array of Central
European talent cast in the minor roles. There are several distinctive and
memorable elements to this movie: the haunting zither music that provides the
score; the skewed camera angles and use of shadows; and postwar Vienna itself
as a backdrop, bombed out and divided politically into zones of occupation.
There is remarkable life in this movie, which often is cited as a perfect mar-
riage of word and image, as well as sound and symbol. The distinctive musical
score for The Third Man was performed on the zither by Anton (Toni) Karas
and became an international hit. The Austrian Oswald Hafenrichter adroitly
edited the movie.
There are notable visual moments in this movie. A train’s departure is
indicated by the light patterns of its windows projected across a cloud of steam.
A cat is photographed brushing its whiskers against the outline of a human
figure obscured by the shadows. The finale that climaxes Martins’s pursuit of
Lime constitutes a chase through the labyrinthine sewers of the city. The end-
ing of The Third Man, too, gained attention. Anna, as she leaves Lime’s funeral,
walks not into Martins’s arms in the conventional final embrace of a resolution
expected by most viewers, but instead passes right by him staring ahead impas-
sively. We know that the director Reed held out for this ending.
Selznick did not release The Third Man in the United States until Febru-
ary 1950, presumably because he feared that American audiences might not
be ready to accept a theme of unmistakable Central European cynicism of the
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sort not normally found in Hollywood movies up to that time. As a tie-in to
the movie, a written version of The Third Man was published in the United
States in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, promoted as “the story from which
the famous movie was made.” Still, respected critics liked The Third Man.
Bosley Crowther’s review in the New York Times on the occasion of the
movie’s release offered this opinion:
Top credit must go to Mr. Reed for molding all possible elements into a
thriller of super-consequence. And especially must he be credited with the
brilliant and triumphant device of using the music of a zither as the sole
musical background in this film. This eerie and mesmerizing music, which
is rhythmic and passionate and sad, becomes, indeed, the commentator—the
genius loci—of the Viennese scene.
THE ACADEMY’S BEST PICTURE FOR 1949
Produced, written, and directed by Robert Rossen, All the King’s Men (1949)
was based on Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the same
name, published three years earlier. The movie chronicles the rise and fall of
a Southern political demagogue, Willie Stark, played by Broderick Crawford.
From an early record of support for civic improvement, Stark’s public career
eventually is turned to ashes by a corrupting and insatiable greed for power,
and ends with his assassination. Stark is modeled closely on a former governor
of Louisiana and powerful U.S. senator, Huey Long. Although Stark starts
out in the movie with a burning sense of purpose and a defiant honesty and
integrity, the darker complexity of his true nature is never far from the surface.
In the film, Stark’s darker side is revealed in comments made to his press agent
(played by John Ireland) who serves as the movie’s narrator.
The visual style of the movie was marked by Burnett Guffey’s crisp
black-and-white cinematography. Edited by Robert Parrish and Al Clark, All
the King’s Men displayed notable staccato cutting in several scenes, reminiscent
of impressionism in a number of German silent movies from the 1920s. A
Columbia production, the movie earned a Best Picture Oscar, but not Best
Director. Many years after Rossen’s death in 1966, his widow claimed the he
had been denied the vote in the Academy because of McCarthyism; this claim,
like many others concerning this period, is difficult to assess.
Rossen, who had moved to Hollywood in 1936 from New York City
to work as a contract screenwriter at Warner Bros., had joined a Communist
Party cell for a period of time, as did a great many idealists, university students,
and others who were frustrated and disillusioned by the continuing economic
Postwar Unravelings 121
depression that began after the stock market collapse of October 1929. In
1947, Rossen was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Ac-
tivities Committee, chaired by Rep. J. Parnell Thomas, but after the convic-
tion of the Hollywood Ten for contempt of Congress, the HUAC hearings
were suspended before Rossen—who had severed his ties with the Commu-
nist Party two years earlier—was called.
Rossen notably continued to work in Hollywood during the following
years. He cowrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, produced The Undercover
Man, and directed Johnny O’Clock, Body and Soul, and The Brave Bulls, as well
as All the King’s Men in the late 1940s. Given the anonymity and secrecy of
Academy voting, the historical record will never reveal why Rossen did not
win Best Director, although the person directing the Best Picture clearly has
no guarantee of being voted Best Director because of it.
In 1951, Rossen testified at new HUAC hearings, saying that he was not
presently involved with the Communist Party, but he refused to talk about
the past and declined to name others in the movie industry with whom he
had associated during his affiliation with the Communist Party. He was then
blacklisted by the industry, but two years later he requested a special hearing
from HUAC, at which he named some fifty past associates in the Communist
Party, presumably so that he could work again. Not long after, he left South-
ern California and moved back to New York City, where he continued his
career directing feature films until his death.
BROADWAY AND SUNSET BOULEVARD
The Best Picture of 1950 was All About Eve, produced for Twentieth Cen-
tury-Fox by Darryl F. Zanuck and written and directed by Joseph L. Mankie-
wicz. It was based on a short story entitled “The Wisdom of Eve” by Mary
Orr, rights to which had been purchased by Zanuck (originally intended as
a vehicle for actress Susan Hayward) when a version of it was produced and
aired as an NBC radio drama. Set in the Broadway theater world in New York
City, All About Eve was filmed entirely at the Fox studios in Los Angeles, with
doubles used for the cast with a “B” camera unit to film additional footage for
the movie on the streets of the actual Broadway theater district in New York
City. Nominated for a record fourteen Oscars, All About Eve won six.
The original short story by Orr, which had been published in Cosmo-
politan, was reputedly based on the real-life experiences of actress Elizabeth
Bergner when she and her husband, Paul Czinner, had taken a zealous and
self-promoting young actress under their wing. All About Eve is a melodrama,
but it also is a rich satire of show business. Some movie industry insiders even