The Final Victim of the Blacklist: John Howard Lawson, Dean of the Hollywood Ten, Gerald Horne, (2006)

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 384pp., ISBN-10: 0520248600 (pbk), $25.95.

The recent death of Sidney Pollack and the grand gesture of New York Times critic A.O. Scott pronouncing Pollack the last of the old-time Hollywood directors brought back again, once more unstated, the premise of the Golden Age narrative. Did Pollack make films of a certain kind, social themes, big stars with progressive credentials (indeed, the biggest: Robert Redford), then perhaps did those films look somehow like the films that were made before the blacklist, also by writers or directors redeemed after the blacklist? One might read the meaning between the lines of Scott's otherwise intelligent and far-sweeping observations. But the words would not be used.

The saga of John Howard Lawson has, from a certain standpoint, always been a Cold War blacklisters' favorite. The brilliant avant-gardist playwright of the 1920s who became a leading Hollywood Communist in the 1930s wielded the polemical pen if not whip in the 1940s, following Central Committee commands to constrain dissent and artistic freedom. The "Maltz Incident" in which a leading screenwriter, Albert Maltz, was made to repent his supposed sins, became the perfect excuse for cold warriors (notably historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a "communist expert" for the slick magazines) to call the Hollywood Communists dangerous, even when nobody could say in what ways exactly. The FBI penetration, the hearings, the Blacklist and the mood of fear that shut down Hollywood's social themes went in all directions, but never got entirely away from Lawson.

We have learned more about the larger context, in recent years, thanks to a spate of books heavily researched in available scholarly archives but also through our VCRs and DVDs, because the low-budget Hollywood 1930-50s films once almost unobtainable have mostly become available in one way or another. Speculation about Lawson's work, the films that reached the screen, can never be wholly untangled from what got lost between typewritten text and final production, for many reasons, but at least the evidence is far richer. Also, the political situation of the leftwing Hollywood writers is more understandable because of the oral histories with survivors (some of it mine) who give insights that never made it into typescript let alone film, and because of a few exceptional biographies. Larry Ceplair's The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico is one of these, Gerald Horne's The Final Victim is another.

These two writers in themselves constituted a range of political inclinations and personalities among what was for an extended historical moment an exceptionally creative and influential milieu, indeed a high point in American popular (and other) art. They accepted the Soviet Union as the "socialist homeland," at least through the 1940s and into the early Cold War, and together they did much to build the Screen Writers' Union. They struggled together against the philistinism of the studios, not to mention the racism of almost everyone but the Communists and a handful of conscience liberals in Hollywood. But they disagreed sharply over the control of culture by political line, and there was the rub: Lawson's reputation as Hollywood Commissar was not entirely unwarranted, by any means. (Jarrico mostly went along, unwillingly, then regretted it later, as he struggled, produced Salt of the Earth, 1954, and became an anti-Stalinist Marxist by 1956 or so.)

Perhaps what Lawson lacked most of all was a sense of humor, one of Jarrico's great positive qualities. Not that he was wrong in taking himself seriously. As Horne carefully explains with thorough reference to archives, Lawson was badly hurt by the anti-Semitism of Williams College, greatly encouraged by the applause of his theatrical modernism of the 1920s, and bitterly disappointed by the reality of the Hollywood experience of the 1930s. He was a wounded, angry man, as his friends (and his son) have commented widely, because of the blows suffered by the victims of capitalism (and racism, and anti-Semitism) but also because he knew the potential value of his own work.

If I have a criticism of Horne's book, it is that he spends so much time on the politics that the aesthetics of successful film moments get short shrift. Counter-Attack (1945) hardly achieved a theatrical presence but is an extraordinary exercise in a subterranean cellar, brilliantly filmed by James Wong Howe, where Russians and their outnumbering German captives exchange philosophical observations. Lawson scripts that became considerably less aesthetic films but were enjoyable entertainment, like They Shall Have Music (1937) about a bunch of New York school kids who get their school's musical instruments repossessed, are of interest in their own respect. Not, of course, if the prospect of great Marxist filmmaking was in the offing. But that never happened, and Lawson proved himself a talented and versatile writer whose seriousness never allowed him to give himself enough credit. Not that a different attitude would have kept him off the Blacklist.

Horne writes well on the Big Films, bitter disappointments to semi-triumphs, and on Lawson's political struggles, for the dignity of screenwriting quite as much as for the final triumph of socialism. Jarrico observed to me (and of course, too many others) that Lawson would more than happily have gone along with a repudiation of Stalinism long before 1956, with an acceptance of communist polycentrism, intellectual tolerance of different Marxisms, and so on. He was too loyal to the big idea of the Russian Revolution to say so, and the punishment he suffered from the 1930s until the end of his life stiffened his resolve. This book may not be the last word on Lawson – there can be no last word on the Golden Age Hollywood Left because its influence, the models that it established for social drama and social comedy, are followed up to now – but it is an enormously useful study.

Contributor details
Paul Buhle, Brown University.