100 Books Like Tender Comrades

I always like books that trace the origins of a political movement, because they almost always go farther back than we think.

This one follows the suppression of radical activity in Hollywood from the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a time that also saw the founding of the Writers’ Guild, a union that gave writers some actual power in an industry that ran on power and often regarded writers as disposable. But even the Writers Guild couldn’t defend those accused of communist sympathies by their government.

It is significant in our current era that no Hollywood Communist, even the real ones, was ever linked to espionage or sabotage, and that evidence of the supposed subversive indoctrination planted in films was nonexistent. 

An editor of my book, Brian Neve has written extensively on the Hollywood Left, with many books, articles, and chapters devoted to filmmakers such as Cy Endfield, Elia Kazan, Robert Rossen, and Joseph Losey, or more broadly to politics and American cinema. A useful complement to the Ceplair & Englund volume, this astute, engaging, and empirically-grounded study explores how a generational cohort of radical and liberal creative practitioners—including Kazan, Losey, Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, Jules Dassin, John Huston, and Orson Welles—were energized by the political culture of the Depression era and sought, in different ways, to navigate the industrial and commercial constraints of Hollywood to produce socially-engaged films. This project was brutally stifled by the blacklist, with many filmmakers forced to choose between exile or collaboration. 

Rebecca Prime is one of the contributors to my book and her book is a fascinating sequel to that volume. It covers the careers of several blacklisted filmmakers who fled Hollywood and America, seeking to find new work and life opportunities in Europe. Impeccably researched and elegantly written, Prime’s study tells the story of a generation of creative workers that was lost to the USA but which made a vital contribution to European and British cinemas. As she details, many of the exiled filmmakers faced almighty personal and professional struggles to adjust to their new circumstances, and while a few (e.g. Joseph Losey and Jules Dassin) would eventually achieve fabulous success, many other exiles found it difficult to secure regular and fulfilling work opportunities or personal happiness.

Many victims of the blacklist have written memoirs of their experiences, including Lester Cole, Ring Lardner, Jr., Bernard Gordon, and Walter Bernstein. But we are also fortunate to have excellent books from two articulate and talented women writers—Norma Barzman and Jean Rouverol (Refugees from Hollywood: A Journal of the Blacklist Years, 2000)—who offer emotionally nuanced accounts of the personal and professional consequences of political persecution and exile. As wives and mothers, their reminiscences inevitably have a very different centre of gravity than those of male blacklistees. Barzman is unrepentant about the progressive causes embraced by the American Communist Party while also critiquing the misogyny of many male comrades. This is a witty and insightful book by an engaging, clear-sighted, and forward-thinking survivor.

As the child of screenwriters, Naming Names felt personal to me.

It was probably the first serious attempt at a comprehensive account of the Hollywood Blacklist, the product of the Red Scare driven by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Sen. Joseph McCarthy that shattered careers and lives.

It examines not only the politics of the hunt for communists in the arts but the lives of the real people affected and the fear generated when colleagues and neighbors were pressured to turn on each other in their testimony.

It is particularly timely just now.

While several books have offered accounts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) hearings and the blacklist in the entertainment industry, Alan Casty questions liberal perspectives on the subject, and develops a distinctive perspective. In particular he challenges what he sees as an overly simple moral take on the actions of those who cooperated with HUAC and those who did not. He discusses the role of the Communist Party in Hollywood and the impact of Cold War politics— and the politics of Stalin and the Soviet Union—on the decisions that politicians and witnesses took. There is particularly interesting material here on Robert Rossen’s experience, as someone who ‘resisted’ the Committee but later cooperated with it. This Is the best account of those that challenge the dominant perspectives in the literature. 

Renowned cultural historian Thomas Doherty provides a granular, blow-by-blow retelling of the events that led to the Hollywood blacklist. He places particular emphasis on the hearings as a ‘media-political spectacle,’ seeing it as the first such media event of the postwar era. He reexamines the events through a close and careful reading of press and media responses of the time. Less cinema-centric than other accounts, and less mesmerized by key individuals, Doherty gives us a cool, skeptical perspective on what is often an emotive or partisan discourse. There is much detail on how filmmakers, activists, politicians, newspaper and radio figures acted, and for what reasons, and how and why the post-war hearings played out as they did. The result is a sophisticated cultural history of the blacklist era.

I loved this book for the personal stories behind the political nightmare.

Radical Hollywood is about the people who, by their politics, caught the communist-hunters’ eye. It is a fascinating, detailed, often affectionate account of the Hollywood Left in film-making’s Golden Age—the behind-the-scenes stories of famous films, writers, and actors, and their impact on the most popular entertainment medium of the time.

I loved this novel for its heroine and for its pitch-perfect recreation of the 1950s, combining Fanny’s blossoming career as a writer of radio serials with the looming danger of the McCarthy-era blacklist.

The author is a child of that time, and her memory is spot-on, from seams in women’s stockings to the cloud of suspicion that gathered around a writer who went to the wrong meeting or subscribed to the wrong magazine, much less flirted with Communism twenty years earlier or even knew someone who had.

Defending oneself against it was impossible. A blacklisted writer or actor simply disappeared. I found echoes of current politics in both the blacklist and the post-war urge to shove women back into the kitchen and nursery. 

If this beautifully illustrated collection of Hollywood tragedies were only kink, only lurid scandal like so many cheap TV potshots, it wouldn’t be the iconic masterpiece it has become. Kenneth Anger’s take on the faded and fallen Hollywood differs because he loves the place and its people with all his heart.

A child starling and renegade director in his own right (Scorpio Rising, Kustom Kar Kommandoes), he oozes child-like wonder and horror on every page. As he puts it in the book’s equally stark sequel, Hollywood Babylon II, the movies “promise immortality, but don’t really deliver.”