Golden Globe nominee Walter Bernstein, who died in Manhattan aged 101, was one of the last survivors of the blacklist, the McCarthy era’s witch hunt that destroyed the Hollywood careers of writers, actors, and other industry folks in the 1950s.

Bernstein not only rebuilt his career but used his experience to craft an award-winning movie about his travails and survival. The Front (1976) told his story of writing under assumed names and having other screenwriters act as his ‘front’- presenting his work as their own.

Bernstein never stopped working.  A 2014 Esquire piece called the then 94 old ‘a human Energizer bunny’ who was writing, developing TV projects, and teaching dramatic writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Walter Bernstein was born in Brooklyn, New York on August 20, 1919. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, his father Louis was a schoolteacher and Walter grew in a middle-class home. In his autobiography, ‘Inside Out, a Memoir of the Blacklist ‘ (1996) he tells how he fell in love with movies while in high school. The Astor theater was next door, matinees cost a dime, and young Walter spent his hours away from school at the theater.

A second major influence was a graduation gift from his father, a six month scholarship at an intensive language school in Grenoble, France. It was not Walter’s first choice. He’d rather have gone to Hollywood, he wrote in his book. But that half a year in pre-World War II France introduced the young Walter to different academic, intellectual, and political world views, including the communist party’s.

Returning home, Walter attended Dartmouth college and became the students’ newspaper’s film critic, and he could indulge in his movie-viewing passion using his press card. ‘The only catch ‘ he would write later in his book ‘was that there were no (press) previews, so you had to write the review before seeing the movie’ . He was undaunted: ‘ …anyone could review a movie after seeing it, that was mere criticism…doing it this way made it art’.

Soon after graduating Walter was drafted and wrote his first play, Grin and Bear It, which was staged at his States side military base.

Pearl Harbor cut the budding playwright’s career short. He was sent to Europe as a correspondent for the military magazine Yank. He was able to infiltrate into the partisan held part of Yugoslavia, trekked for seven days, and his interview with their leader and hero, Marshal Josef Broz Tito was a journalistic coup.

Returning home, now a war tested writer, Bernstein was introduced to the Communist Party by an aunt, who asked him to tell her comrades about his meeting with Tito. He would later join the Party.

 

In 1947, having published his war stories for Yank and the New Yorker in a well-received book, ‘Keep Your Head Down’, Bernstein was ready for Hollywood.  Writer-producer Robert Rossen had offered him a contract at Columbia, and Bernstein started working as an uncredited contributing writer to All the King’s Men (1949), which was nominated for seven Golden Globes and won five, including Best Picture, Drama and Best Director for Rossen.

Harold Hecht, his agent, who had formed a production company with Burt Lancaster signed him away from Columbia and gave Bernstein his first screenplay credit, for Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948), a noir starring Lancaster and Joan Fontaine.

Just then the political climate in Hollywood started to change, as Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Unamerican Activities Committee  (HUAC) launched their red hunt, focused on the Hollywood creative community.

Where left-wing sentiments and activities were accepted and rather common, they now became a target. Communist party affiliation or even sympathy were a cause for persecution and ostracism.

The HUAC sought out party members. It jailed witnesses who refused to name names and the Hollywood establishment blacklisted scores of Hollywood talent. Once on the blacklist, no one would hire them.

‘Red Channels’ (1950), a red-baiting publication, posted names, and Bernstein’s appeared prominently. ‘I was listed right after (composer) Lenny Bernstein, ‘ Walter Bernstein recalled. there were about eight listings for me, and they were all true.’ Indeed, he wrote for the leftist ‘New Masses’, supported civil rights activism, Soviet relief drive, the loyalists in the Spanish civil war, and other left-wing causes.

Blacklisted actors were out of luck and out of work. But writers went underground. They kept writing for sympathetic producers and directors, used assumed names, and when the studio wanted to meet them, they had other writers front for them.

Bernstein was brought out of the shadows by director Sidney Lumet (Golden Globe winner for directing Network (1977) ) who hired Bernstein openly to write the screenplay for his Sophia Loren starrer That Kind of Woman (1959),.

Lumet has recommended Bernstein to producer Carlo Ponti, Loren’s husband. who did not know Bernstein or care about the blacklisting. He just took Lumet’s word, and Bernstein had his name on his work. That was a year before the release of Spartacus (1960), which is often considered the first breaking of the blacklist by producer and star Kirk Douglas giving blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo a screen credit.

Although he stayed in New York, Bernstein continued to work for Hollywood. He wrote some lightweight scripts: George Cukor‘s  Heller in Pink Tights (1960) again starring Sophia Loren. He adapted Michael Curtiz’s A Breath of Scandal (1960) the third collaboration with Loren. He also wrote Marilyn Monroe‘s last, unfinished movie Something’s Got to Give (1962). But the old rebel spirit soon came out, as Bernstein turned to subjects that occupied him since his youth, and were attuned to the zeitgeist.

He tackled racial intolerance in Paris Blues (1961), which he wrote for fellow blacklist victim director Martin Ritt. Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman play ex-pat American jazz musicians living in Paris and dating local women. Fail-Safe (1964), directed by his friend and mentor Sidney Lumet, addressed the fear of nuclear confrontation and disaster. It was made shortly after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis brought the cold war rivals, the United States and the Soviet Union close to a nuclear war.

Henry Fonda plays the President of the USA who allows a strike on New York City after American bombers slipped the ‘fail-safe’ and hit Moscow. Ritt also directed The Molly McGuires (1970). Richard Harris and Sean Connery play Irish immigrant miners in the late 19th century Pennsylvania coal mines, who encounter exploitation and union-busting.

Bernstein and Ritt drew on their blacklisting experience in The Front (1976). Conceived as a drama, Columbia Pictures asked Bernstein to treat his story with humor, which he did.  The studio then wanted to cast Warren Beatty or Robert Redford in the lead, but he and Ritt thought that these popular heartthrobs are wrong for the role. They pushed for a nightclub comedian turned movie maker, Woody Allen, who was nebbishness incarnated. He was perfectly cast as a mousy restaurant cashier and small-time bookie who agrees to act as the ‘front’ for three blacklisted writers.

A year later, Allen returned the favor and cast Bernstein in a cameo in his breakout romantic comedy Annie Hall (1977).

Other cast and crew were blacklist survivors, including the lead, Zero Mostel. The character he played was based on Philip Loeb, an actor who committed suicide after being blacklisted. The Front earned Bernstein his only Oscar nomination, It also received one Golden Globe nomination: Andrea Marcovicci, for Best Acting Debut in a Motion Picture Female, a discontinued award category.

Reflecting on that period, Bernstein told a reporter:  ‘… I was able to work. And I made some very good and profound relationships with other blacklisted people. …In some respects, it was a not-unhappy time …. because of the feeling of solidarity, the feeling of community we had. We helped each other.’

Bernstein also covered a range of other subjects.  Michael Ritchie’s Semi-Tough (1977) was a romantic comedy set in the world of pro football. Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson are players who fall for Jill Clayburgh, the team owner’s daughter.

Another collaboration with Ritchie was An Almost Perfect Affair (1979), also a romantic comedy with Keith Carradine and Monica Vitti, playing a filmmaker in Cannes having an affair with a producer’s wife. He also co-wrote Yanks ( 1979). Directed by John Schlesinger and starring Richard Gere and Vanessa Redgrave, it is a story of Yankee soldiers and English women during WW II. The following year Bernstein wrote and directed his only feature film, Little Miss Marker (1980).

It was based on a Damon Runyon story about a 1930s gruff New York bookie played by Walter Matthau who grudgingly accepts a six years old girl as collateral for a bet, and it turns his life upside-down. An all-star cast – Julie Andrews, Tony Curtis, Bob Newhart, Lee Grant -did not save the movie, and Bernstein did not direct again. He won his Golden Globe nomination in 2001 for re-writing his 1964 Fail-Safe as a live presentation TV movie, with Richard Dreyfuss playing the U.S. President this time around.

Bernstein never stopped writing. He told an interviewer that a critic once called him ‘that useful screenwriter.’ ‘To be useful is important to me,’ he said, ‘to feel that what you’ve done has been of some use — whether artistically, or socially, or politically or whatever hasn’t been a waste.’

“I write every day, or what passes for writing,’ he told a reporter in 2015,…’I wake up and I sit down at the computer, and after that, it’s up for grabs.  That’s what I do. They’ll carry me off writing.”

Walter Bernstein, screenwriter extraordinaire, who never wasted, was carried off writing, aged 101.