Hollywood Exiles in Europe: The Blacklist and Cold War Film Culture

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION Of course, none of us was really aware of how fragmented McCarthy would cause our lives to be. Now no matter what we’ve left bits and pieces in various places, perhaps too many places. —Ben Barzman T his book owes its existence to a chance meeting. On a spring afternoon in Paris, I bumped into an acquaintance from New York who invited me to join her at her favorite tea room, nearby on the rue Royale. Over rainbowcolored macarons, I listened as Suzo Barzman, daughter of the blacklisted screenwriters and Hollywood exiles Ben and Norma Barzman, recounted her expatriate childhood in Paris, where her parents had settled in the early 1950s. I had of course heard of the Hollywood blacklist, but I had no inkling of the exodus of Hollywood directors, screenwriters, and actors to Europe that the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigations into communism had prompted. My conversation with Suzo lodged itself in my head for years. Eventually, as a graduate student in film studies, I began the process of discovery that has culminated in this book. Starting with the Barzmans, I began to populate the Paris exile community, its extension in the south of France, the small group in Rome, and the large colony of blacklisted Americans in London. To my astonishment, my own expatriate childhood in London turned out to have been spent in the shadow of the blacklisted émigrés, a number of whom had lived around the corner from my family ’shouse. A serendipitous personal connection thus led to a commitment to documenting the neglected history of the blacklisted exiles in Europe. In piecing together what Suzo Barzman’s father called the “bits and pieces” left by those whose lives were disrupted by the HUAC investigations and 1950s Cold War politics, this book has several goals. On the most fundamental level, it aims to tell the tale of a group of people whose lives were driven in unimagined directions as a result of the anticommunist sentiment that pervaded American postwar culture: a tale 2 Hollywood Exiles in Europe not previously told, but with significant implications for our understanding of an important era in American and European cultural history and film culture. Despite the voluminous and ever-growing scholarly literature on the blacklist, very little attention has been paid to the blacklisted diaspora and its members’ important contributions to postwar European cinema.1 My study’s scope extends far beyond Hollywood and challenges the periodization and resolutely domestic terms in which the blacklist is usually—and categorically—discussed.2 By calling attention to the Hollywood blacklist’s important and understudied transnational dimensions, I argue that the history of the blacklisted exiles in Europe is significant to our understanding of postwar American and European cinema for a range of reasons. The professional triumphs of the blacklisted community in Europe played a direct role in hastening the end of the blacklist in America, while the inconsistencies in the blacklist’s enforcement overseas reflected the complex interplay and negotiations—between Cold War cultural policy, the Hollywood studios, conservative pressure groups, and the blacklisted themselves—that characterized the blacklist’s slow demise over the course of the 1950s and 1960s. Analyzing the experience of the blacklisted in Europe also allows us to reconsider the development of postwar European cinema and its changing relationship with Hollywood during this era. Was the presence of the blacklisted Americans in Europe at a time when European cinema’s prestige was growing and Hollywood’s was diminishing an ironic coincidence, or did the blacklisted play a more catalytic role in shifting Hollywood’s attention toward Europe? How did the exiles’ contradictory status as Hollywood communists and American political refugees complicate European concern with preserving their national cinemas from Hollywood’s powerful influence? As these questions suggest, the role of the American blacklisted community in Europe in the postwar shift from national to “transnational” cinema has not been fully considered until now. The practical challenges of reconstructing the history of the blacklisted community in Europe have undoubtedly contributed to its absence from film history. Noneofthekeyexiledfilmmakersisstillliving.(Threepassedawayduringthewriting of this book: Bernard Gordon in May 2006, Jules Dassin in March 2008, and Betsy Blair in March 2009.) There are few secondary sources devoted to the subject , or even closely related ones, such as the rise of Hollywood “runaway production ” in Europe beginning in the late 1940s or studies of the relationship between the Cold War and transatlantic film culture.3 A number of...