In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

173 CONCLUSION Back in this ghost town called Paris where there doesn’t seem to be anyone left whom I know. But there are reminders of you, little mementoes which recall that once you were here too, in this very apartment. —Lee Gold Lee Gold’s elegiac tone in this letter to Paul Jarrico from September 1964 gives a sense of the losses their formerly “tight little Paris colony” had suffered in the preceding years.1 The Wilsons had decamped to Ojai, California, that summer; the Barzmans were living full-time in Provence; John Berry had spent much of the year in New York directing for stage and television; and Jules Dassin was on the road promoting his latest film, Topkapi. Two years earlier, Jarrico had left the Paris group, convinced that the booming British film industry would offer better professional opportunities for an Anglophone screenwriter. Betsy Blair had also crossed the Channel, moving to London in 1963 when she married the English Czech director Karel Reisz.2 Nor was the London community intact. Hannah Weinstein’s Sapphire Productions had ceased operations abruptly in the winter of 1961 as a result of financial mismanagement on the part of Weinstein’s husband, Jonathan Fisher. Joseph Losey offered this description of her situation in a letter to their mutual friend, Vladimir Pozner: Her empire has collapsed totally, apparently through the mistakes (not to give them an uglier name) of Jonathan. He had apparently disappeared from the house and was finally discovered in Edinburgh; though I don’t know the details, I gather that he has still not regained consciousness. Meantime, the studio has been taken over by receivers, as was also her house, her cars, and apparently everything. They are keeping it as quiet as possible, and she is in Edinburgh so I have not yet spoken to her. The children are being wonderful, and are being taken care of, so I think there is really nothing anyone can do at this moment excepting to hope that something will be rescued for her.3 174 Hollywood Exiles in Europe Shortly thereafter, Weinstein returned to New York, where she eventually reestablished herself as a film producer; her first credit was for Claudine (1974), directed by her old friend John Berry and nominated for an Academy Award. Those who remained in London were separated by the ever-widening gulf left by their diverging professional and personal paths. For some, the lingering influence of the blacklist along with a thriving (and thus competitive) British film industry posed frequent roadblocks to success. “Everything seemed to fall through,” remembers Adrian Scott’s widow, Joan LaCour Scott. “A film that was supposed to star Warren Beatty and have Joseph Losey as a director didn’t happen. Adrian wasn’t credited for films he did writing on, Night Must Fall (dir. Karel Reisz, 1964) among others.”4 During his five years in England , the screenwriter Lester Cole saw only one commercial project come to fruition: Born Free (dir. James Hill, 1966), produced by Columbia through the auspices of Carl Foreman, who intervened when the studio balked at Cole’s blacklisted status.5 Other exiles, however, were rapidly becoming film industry fixtures. In 1965, Carl Foreman was appointed to the British Film Institute ’s Board of Governors. Five years later, he was made a CBE to honor his contributions to the British film industry. Joseph Losey was likewise a VIP in England as a result of the success of The Servant (1963), which he followed with a string of films, most notably King and Country (1964), Accident (1967), and The Go-Between (1970), in which his sensitive dissection of the British class system and its mores secured his reputation as being “more English than the Brits.”6 With its members either dispersed to the winds or immersed in their European careers, by the mid-1960s the blacklisted exile community had ceased to function as such. However, the experience of the blacklist and exile created lasting bonds among the émigrés. Denis Berry recalls the importance his father placed on attending the Los Angeles premiere of Jules Dassin’s A Dream of Passion in 1978.7 When Paul Jarrico died in 1997, Berry wrote his eulogy, which Norma Barzman read at the funeral in California. Joseph Losey maintained a close correspondence with the Barzmans in his later years and visited them in Los Angeles a number of times in the early 1980s. Whereas HUAC succeeded in fracturing the radical community in...

Share