Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten
The Hollywood Ten have been granted legendary, even heroic status by many film historians for their refusal to cooperate. They directors and screenwriters imprisoned for contempt of Congress as the result of hearings in 1947 by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the infamous HUAC. The committee subpoenaed a raft of producers and directors as it probed into Communist infiltration of Hollywood. Many witnesses were asked if they were or had been members of the Communist Party. Most were not but several confessed and named their party comrades. Those were deemed as the “friendly witnesses.” However, 10 writers and directors remained silent. They were dubbed the “unfriendly witnesses” and the “Hollywood Ten.”
The politics and paranoia, justice and injustice of HUAC has been mulled over many times. With Radical Innocence, author Bernard F. Dick looks at the Hollywood Ten not from constitutional or political perspectives but as a critic of their work. What movies, novels, short stories or plays did they write or direct? How do they stand in the cultural history of America?
Billy Wilder famously quipped that of the Ten, “only two had talent; the other eight were just unfriendly.” While Dick shows that all had talent, it’s telling that only two are generally familiar names to film buffs for their work in cinema: director Edward Dmytryk and writer Dalton Trumbo.
Trumbo’s story has been often told. Brian Cranston played him in a 2015 biographical film and he is remembered for working under assumed names during the time he was blacklisted in Hollywood. His covert screenwriting continued until Kirk Douglas insisted on crediting him for writing Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 film Spartacus. That was the coup the finally broke the Hollywood Blacklist.
Dmytryk’s creative and political experience is at least as interesting and instructive as Trumbo’s. He learned filmmaking from the bottom up—on the cutting room floor—and delivered his productions on time and under budget. He worked with whatever material he was handed and achieved his greatest success in film noir, including Raymond Chandler’s Murder, My Sweet and a psychological investigation of anti-Semitic violence, Crossfire. “The characters in his best films move within an oppressively closed universe, tightly framed by a camera that replicates the archway in which life has trapped them,” Dick writes.
Feeling oppressed within the Communist Party, Dmytryk broke with them when the party boss tried to interfere with a screenplay. Although he’d only been a party member for a year and renounced its dogma, he refused to reveal the names of party members to HUAC and was, as a result, sentenced to prison. In his view, “to have done otherwise would have made him less of a man.”
Dick brings astute analysis and a gift for good writing to his unique look at the Hollywood Ten.
Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten is published by University Press of Kentucky
