On the 65th anniversary of the Hollywood blacklist, Sean Penn wrote an article for The Hollywood Reporter discussing his blacklisted father, Leon Penn. In the article, Penn called his dad “a patriot to his core,” a war veteran who was “barred from working in motion pictures by the same country for which he had risked his life.”
During this time, the MPAA president Eric Johnston said that none of the blacklisted individuals would work in the business again until they declared under oath that they were not a communist. The heads of the studios, including names like Louis B, Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn, signed the declaration saying they needed to protect the “innocent people” of the world.
Here is a look at some of the major names that fell during the blacklisted era and the one man who helped them rise again.
Jules Dassin
Director Jules Dassin was a member of the communist party for a brief time, but left the party in 1939. When the Red Scare started, no one seemed to care if a person was still a member and Dassin found himself blacklisted because of his previous involvement. He had made some fantastic movies before his blacklisting such as Film Noir’s “Brute Force,” “Night in the City,” and “The Naked City,” a movie that won an Oscar for its cinematography.
Dassin was one of the few blacklisted directors who went on to continued success. While he had to leave Hollywood, he went overseas and directed the 1954 French Noir masterpiece “Rififi.”
Charlie Chaplin
While not officially blacklisted, the FBI officially investigated Charlie Chaplin and eventually J. Edgar Hoover drove him out of the business, and ultimately out of the United States. One of the best comedic actors in cinema history, Chaplin was an outspoken individual who angered Hoover, making the law enforcement leader attempt to manipulate the law to revoke Chaplin’s work visa. Chaplin left the United States in 1952 to promote a movie and Hoover revoked Chaplin’s re-entry permit.
Chaplin chose not to fight it and moved to Switzerland, saying that the U.S. was not worth living in due to the “unhealthy atmosphere” perpetrated by “reactionary groups.” Chaplin only returned once, in 1972 to receive an Honorary Oscar.
Kirk Douglas
The one man that finally stood up to the bullying of the government and studios in the blacklisting scandals was Kirk Douglas. The legendary actor even titled his autobiography “I am Spartacus,” recounting how he helped break the blacklisting by secretly hiring a blacklisted writer to pen “Spartacus.” By doing this, Douglas ignored the blacklist and hired Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted writer who was at one time a member of the Communist Party.
“When it came to the blacklist, they were the guilty parties,” Douglas says of the studio heads. “They loved to push around writers and actors… They all caved in when they could’ve taken a united stand and stopped it.”
See also:
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