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CINEASTE MAGAZINE PRESENTS:
SCREENWRITERS AND THE BLACKLIST: BEFORE, DURING, AND AFTER
PART 3: POST-BLACKLIST
March 6-15
The damage wrought by the Hollywood blacklist, especially the hardships
endured by its victims, has been well documented. This series showcases
the artistic contributions of prominent blacklisted screenwriters,
including well-known radicals such as Walter Bernstein, Dalton Trumbo,
Ben Barzman, Abraham Polonsky, and Ring Lardner, Jr. Recent scholarship
by Thom Andersen, Pat McGilligan, Larry Ceplair, and Rebecca Prime
emphasizes how films by blacklisted personnel were responsible for
scripts (written, in many cases, by unapologetic Communists) that
explored, both subtly and blatantly, the nuances of race, class, and gender.
The third, and final, part of the series focuses on post-blacklist
‘comeback films’ written by some of Hollywood’s most notable
screenwriters. Many of the films reflect the impact of the social and
political upheavals of the 1960s, particularly the Civil Rights and
antiwar movements, on the so-called ‘New Hollywood.’ Racism is
confronted in Martin Ritt’s PARIS BLUES (written by Walter Bernstein)
and Arthur Penn’s THE CHASE (a Lillian Hellman adaptation of a Horton
Foote play), while the plight of Native Americans is tackled in Abraham
Polonsky’s spectacular return to form, TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE. The
seasoned writers tackled disparate genres with aplomb. M*A*S*H, Robert
Altman’s antiwar comedy, is enlivened by Ring Lardner, Jr.’s irreverent
screenplay. The epic and the western are represented by Ben Barzman’s
script for Anthony Mann’s severely underrated THE FALL OF THE ROMAN
EMPIRE and Dalton Trumbo’s highly idiosyncratic treatment of timeworn
motifs in Robert Aldrich’s THE LAST SUNSET.
SCREENWRITERS AND THE BLACKLIST is co-presented by Cineaste Magazine,
which has been a major source for blacklist-related scholarship
throughout its 40-plus-year history. For more info, visit www.cineaste.com.
Screenwriter Walter Bernstein (whose credits include PARIS BLUES and THE
FRONT) will be here in person for the screenings of FAIL-SAFE and
SEMI-TOUGH on Saturday, March 7!
Special thanks to co-curators Richard Porton and Patrick McGilligan, as
well as to Walter Bernstein, Rebecca Prime, Chris Chouinard (Park
Circus), Paul Ginsburg (Universal), Michael Horne & Christopher Lane
(Sony), Jules McLean, Joe Reid (20th Century Fox), Richard Suchenski
(Center for Moving Image Arts, Bard College), Quentin Tarantino, and
Todd Wiener & Steven Hill (UCLA).
Robert Aldrich
THE LAST SUNSET
1961, 112 min, 35mm. Screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, based on the novel by
Howard Rigsby. With Rock Hudson, Kirk Douglas, Dorothy Malone, Joseph
Cotton, Carol Lynley, and Neville Brand.
“Although Dalton Trumbo considered THE LAST SUNSET his worst script,
this fascinatingly overripe western is noteworthy for Robert Aldrich’s
usual visual panache and a baroque plot that looks forward to the
revisionist ‘last westerns’ of the late 1960s and early 70s. After
completing the script for SPARTACUS, Trumbo, working again for Kirk
Douglas’s Byrna Productions, received a post-blacklist screen credit.
The convoluted plot involves the attempts of the upright sheriff Dan
Stribling (Rock Hudson) to apprehend outlaw Brendan O’Malley (Kirk
Douglas), responsible for the murder of Stribling’s brother-in-law.
O’Malley has been lured to Mexico to reignite his romance with Belle
Breckinridge under the ruse of working on the ranch of her alcoholic
husband John (Joseph Cotten). Ultimately smitten with Belle’s daughter
Melissa (Carol Lynley), O’Malley’s misplaced passion results in a
particularly audacious plot twist. THE LAST SUNSET, even while straining
credulity and reworking themes borrowed from Greek tragedy with mixed
results, is a precursor of the sexual frankness that would permeate
genre films of the late 60s.” –Richard Porton
–Fri, Mar 6 at 6:45, Tues, Mar 10 at 9:15, and Sat, Mar 14 at 2:45.
Irving Lerner
CRY OF BATTLE
1963, 99 min, 16mm, b&w. Screenplay by Bernard Gordon, based on the
novel by Benjamin Appel. With Van Heflin, Rita Moreno, and James MacArthur.
“The overlong source novel for CRY OF BATTLE focused on Filipino
leadership of the U.S.-backed guerrilla movement against Japanese
occupation of the Philippines during WWII. Adapting it offered Gordon a
rare ‘chance to write a film script that would have something to say
about American attitudes toward the native people in those days,’ he
wrote in his memoir ‘Hollywood Exile, or How I Learned to Love the
Blacklist,’ while highlighting the contribution ‘of the Filipinos in the
struggle against the Japanese.’ Irving Lerner, loosely associated with
the Frontier Films documentary collective in the 1930s, shot the film
realistically in and around Manila, with American leads and
distinguished Filipino actors. Bosley Crowther rave-reviewed the
low-budget film in the October 12, 1963, New York Times (‘acerbic and
action-charged’), marking Gordon’s first on-screen credit after a decade
of operating under fronts with as much prolificacy as Dalton Trumbo. CRY
OF BATTLE’s other claim to fame: it was showing in the Dallas theater
where Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended on November 22, 1963. A snippet
can be glimpsed in Oliver Stone’s JFK.” –Patrick McGilligan
–Fri, Mar 6 at 9:15 and Tues, Mar 10 at 7:00.
Arthur Penn
THE CHASE
1966, 135 min, 35mm. Screenplay by Lillian Hellman, based on the play by
Horton Foote. With Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, E.G.
Marshall, Angie Dickinson, Janice Rule, Miriam Hopkins, Robert Duvall,
and James Fox.
“Based on Horton Foote’s play, Lillian Hellman’s screenplay was reworked
– at the behest of producer Sam Spiegel – by both Michael Wilson and
Ivan Moffat. In a 1993 interview with CINEASTE, Arthur Penn complained
that he wasn’t able to oversee the film’s editing and bemoaned the fact
that Spiegel cut many of star Marlon Brando’s ingenious improvisations.
Yet, despite these mishaps, THE CHASE, with its unvarnished depiction of
Southern violence, paved the way for pivotal films of the 1960s –
especially Penn’s own BONNIE AND CLYDE. Robert Redford, in an early
major role, plays Bubber Reeves, a convict on the run after a prison
break. Wrongly imprisoned for murder, Bubber’s escape exacerbates
tensions in the small Texas town where he’s viewed with suspicion, and
where his wife Anna (Jane Fonda) is conducting an affair with the son of
the region’s wealthiest man. In an intriguing reversal of the usual
stereotype, Brando plays a progressive sheriff at odds with local racist
vigilantes.” –Richard Porton
“Violence is a subject that an artist who is intuitively and
intellectually alive to the world in which he exists can scarcely avoid
today; and if there is a more responsible treatment of it anywhere in
the cinema, I have yet to see it.” –Robin Wood on THE CHASE
–Sat, Mar 7 at 2:00, Fri, Mar 13 at 6:30, and Sun, Mar 15 at 8:30.
Sidney Lumet
FAIL-SAFE
1964, 112 min, 35mm, b&w. Screenplay by Walter Bernstein, based on the
novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. With Henry Fonda, Dan
O’Herlihy, Walter Matthau, Frank Overton, Fritz Weaver, Larry Hagman,
William Hansen, Sorrell Booke, Dom DeLuise, and Dana Elcar.
“Bernstein got to know Lumet, formerly a child actor with the Yiddish
Art Theatre, when Lumet was an assistant director to Martin Ritt on
CHARLIE WILD, PRIVATE EYE, a half-hour TV show Bernstein wrote under
‘fronts’ in 1950-51. Bernstein would do some of his finest work with
these simpatico friends, Ritt and Lumet. A writer’s writer, Bernstein
boasts one of the richest of resumés, and seems as comfortable with
tense uncompromising subjects, sweeping recreations of history, and,
especially in the 1970s, philandering romantic comedies. All his films
are social critiques, and his lifelong attention to the
military-industrial complex is followed through in DOOMSDAY GUN, his
1994 HBO film with Frank Langella as a supergun genius caught between
Israel, Iraq, and the CIA, and something of a bookend to FAIL-SAFE.
FAIL-SAFE is one of the tensest of his 1960s credits, a disarmament
parable that is splendidly entertaining and disturbing in equal parts.
‘DR. STRANGELOVE without the humor,’ in Danny Peary’s apt phrase.”
–Patrick McGilligan
–Sat, Mar 7 at 5:45, Wed, Mar 11 at 9:15, and Sun, Mar 15 at 3:30.
Michael Ritchie
SEMI-TOUGH
1977, 108 min, 35mm. Screenplay by Walter Bernstein and an uncredited
Ring Lardner Jr., based on the novel by Dan Jenkins. With Burt Reynolds,
Kris Kristofferson, Jill Clayburgh, Lotte Lenya, Carl Weathers, and
Brian Dennehy.
“SEMI-TOUGH is the better known of Walter Bernstein’s two neo-screwball
comedies for Michael Ritchie, ‘one of those rare directors,’ as Vincent
Canby wrote, ‘who is able to look at Middle America critically without
being especially outraged or even surprised.’ (The other
Bernstein-Ritchie collaboration, AN ALMOST PERFECT AFFAIR from 1979, a
film-biz satire set in Cannes, is also worthy of revival.) A dream cast
romps through this free-wheeling send-up of professional sports,
celebrity, and monogamy. SEMI-TOUGH would make the perfect double bill
with M*A*S*H (written by blacklistee Ring Lardner Jr.) with its anarchic
football climax. ‘Things like THE MOLLY MAGUIRES and THE FRONT, which
came from scratch, are very important to me and mean a lot to me,’
Walter Bernstein said in ‘Backstory 3: Interviews with Screenwriters of
the 60s.’ ‘But so does SEMI-TOUGH, although it came from a book. Michael
and I threw out the story and wrote one of our own. Michael and I did
our own movie, just like Marty [Ritt] and I did our own movies.’”
–Patrick McGilligan
–Sat, Mar 7 at 8:30 and Sun, Mar 8 at 6:15.
Anthony Mann
THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
1964, 188 min, 35mm. Screenplay by Ben Barzman, Basilio Franchina, and
Philip Yordan. With Sophia Loren, Stephen Boyd, Alec Guinness, James
Mason, Christopher Plummer, Anthony Quayle, John Ireland, and Omar Sharif.
The second of the two Samuel Bronston historical super-productions to be
directed by Anthony Mann (after EL CID), both of which were treated with
extreme condescension in their day but have been increasingly recognized
as major achievements, THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE is arguably the
greater of the two. A darker, more intricately structured film than EL
CID, FALL somehow succeeds as both a big-budget, visually astonishing
spectacle animated by a genuine interest in Roman civilization, and a
sophisticated, uncompromising inquiry into the nature of power. Best
known for his collaborations with fellow blacklistee Joseph Losey in
exile in Europe, Ben Barzman co-wrote both FALL and EL CID. In both
cases he worked with Philip Yordan, a mysterious and controversial
figure in the annals of the blacklist – the most famous/notorious
‘front’ of the era, his name appeared on numerous films for which
scholars continue to debate the true authorship.
–Sun, Mar 8 at 2:30 and Sat, Mar 14 at 5:15.
Abraham Polonsky
TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE
1969, 98 min, 35mm. Screenplay by Abraham Polonsky, based on the novel
by Harry Lawton. With Robert Blake, Robert Redford, and Katharine Ross.
The impact of the blacklist on the career of Abraham Polonsky was one of
the great artistic tragedies of the period, just as his comeback in the
late-1960s was among the most triumphant in Hollywood. Bursting on the
scene with the remarkable one-two punch of BODY AND SOUL (1947) (with
Robert Rossen directing Polonsky’s masterful screenplay) and FORCE OF
EVIL (1948) (which Polonsky both wrote and directed), as well as working
on the screenplay for I CAN GET IF FOR YOU WHOLESALE (1951), he refused
to testify before HUAC in 1951 and would not be credited on a theatrical
feature again until 1968. Given the immensity of his talent, the loss of
these prime years is a wound that will never heal. But Polonsky would
pick up right where he had left off, with a terrific script for another
great filmmaker (Don Siegel’s MADIGAN, 1968), followed by one more
astonishing work as writer-director: TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE. A
revisionist Western that probes deeply into the phenomenon of racial and
social injustice, it stars Robert Blake as Paiute Indian Willie Boy, who
becomes an outlaw after killing his lover’s father in self-defense, and
Robert Redford as the sheriff whose imperative to hunt Willie Boy down
flies increasingly in the face of his own conscience.
–Sun, Mar 8 at 9:00, Thurs, Mar 12 at 7:00, and Sat, Mar 14 at 9:00.
Robert Altman
M*A*S*H
1970, 116 min, 35mm. Screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr., based on the novel
by Richard Hooker. With Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, Tom Skerritt,
Sally Kellerman, and Robert Duvall.
“Ring Lardner, Jr., a member of the Hollywood 10, won an Academy Award
for his adaptation of Richard Hooker’s novel. Even though Altman’s
penchant for improvisation angered Lardner, who believed his script was
being sullied, Patrick McGilligan argues that the veteran screenwriter’s
craftsmanship provided a solid framework that made Altman’s innovations
– especially his famous use of rapid fire overlapping dialogue –
possible. There’s little doubt that Lardner was responsible for the
film’s sardonic anti-war thrust. The film revolves around the antics of
two surgeons assigned to a mobile medical unit during the Korean War:
Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) and ‘Trapper’ John McIntyre (Elliott
Gould). M*A*S*H was embraced by the counterculture as an antiwar movie,
even though the emerging women’s movement expressed dismay at the casual
sexism of Altman and Lardner’s depiction of Major Margaret ‘Hot Lips’
Houlihan (Sally Kellerman).” –Richard Porton
“M*A*S*H is a marvelously unstable comedy, a tough, funny, and
sophisticated burlesque of military attitudes that is at the same time a
tale of chivalry. It’s a sick joke, but it’s also generous and romantic
– an erratic episodic film, full of the pleasures of the unexpected. I
think it’s the closest an American movie has come to the kind of
constantly surprising mixture in SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER, though M*A*S*H
moves so fast that it’s over before you have time to think of
comparisons. While it’s going on, you’re busy listening to some of the
best overlapping comic dialogue ever recorded.” –Pauline Kael, THE NEW
YORKER
–Mon, Mar 9 at 6:45, Thurs, Mar 12 at 9:15, and Sun, Mar 15 at 6:00.
Don Siegel
TWO MULES FOR SISTER SARA
1970, 116 min, 35mm. Screenplay by Albert Maltz, story by Budd
Boetticher. With Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine.
This inexplicably neglected western, set during the 1860s French
intervention in Mexico, is every bit as exciting, perfectly crafted, and
disarmingly funny as you’d expect from the dream-team meeting of
Hollywood legends Don Siegel and Budd Boetticher. This despite the fact
that Boetticher, who wrote the original screenplay with the intention of
directing it himself, only to see it eventually re-written by
blacklistee Albert Maltz (resident in Mexico, where he’d relocated
during the blacklist) and directed by Siegel, despised the final
product. Representing Maltz’s first screen credit under his own name
since 1948, TWO MULES is more broadly comic than it might have been in
Boetticher’s hands, but features Clint Eastwood and Shirley Maclaine at
their very best as soldier-of-fortune Hogan and nun-turned-revolutionary
Sara, as well as an Ennio Morricone score that ranks among his most
inspired. Though it would be a stretch to call it a sober study of the
Mexican revolution, the familiarity of both Maltz and Boetticher with
Mexico and their unquestionable interest in its history unmistakably
inform the film.
–Mon, Mar 9 at 9:15, Wed, Mar 11 at 6:45, and Fri, Mar 13 at 9:15.
For screeners, images, and further details, please contact:
Ava Tews, Director of Publicity & Membership, Anthology Film Archives
(212) 505-5181 ext. 20
a...@anthologyfilmarchives.org
About Anthology Film Archives: Founded in 1970, Anthology's mission is
to preserve, exhibit, and promote public and scholarly understanding of
independent, classic, and avant-garde cinema. Anthology screens more
than 1,000 film and video programs per year, publishes books and
catalogs annually, and has preserved more than 900 films to date.
Directions: Anthology is at 32 Second Ave. at 2nd St. Subway: F to 2nd
Ave; 6 to Bleecker.
Tickets: $10 general; $8 for students, seniors, & children (12 & under);
$6 AFA members
Web: http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
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