Walter Bernstein: Radical Scribe of Cinema
The underrated screenwriter survived banishment from the industry he helped change — by resisting.
The death of screenwriter Walter Bernstein did not make many headlines yesterday, nor were any A-listers or make-shift, cracker jack film forums sharing tributes on social media. Indeed, Film Twitter remained quiet (for once). Yet, Bernstein’s passing at the ripe age of 101 beckons more than remembrance of a talented, trailblazing writer, it commands some retrospection on a dark period of American history.
26-year old Walter Bernstein entered Hollywood in 1947, Mank-Era. At the time, the industry was heavily politically active. Unions had only just become welcome but struggled to survive. When Bernstein penned his first on-screen credit as a co-writer for Norman Foster’s 1948 noir Kiss the Blood off My Hands, starring Joan Fontaine and Burt Lancaster, he earned entry into the most detested of organizations — the Screen Writers Guild (SWG).
The guild of the bards and scribes, put upon by towering studio figures and celebrities, routinely fought, and today continue to fight, for higher wages, security, and creative involvement. It was widely known at that point that the SWG was painted as a breeding ground for “Commies”. Surely, the Bible of the Writers Guild was the Communist Manifesto, and in due time Bernstein was sold. Which, of course, meant that his career would be doomed from just about the moment it started. Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Un-American Activities Committee quickly began scouring American soil for Communist Sympathizers; this period is known today as “Red Scare”.
By 1955, Bernstein had one film to his name, about two dozen TV show scripts paying rent, and a membership to the American Communist Party.
He was subsequently ousted, blacklisted by studio after studio with a career merely blossoming.
What happened next in the Book of Bernstein must be hailed and praised. We must remember the victims of the blacklist: those who were imprisoned, those who fled the country, those who defected by taking up jobs painting houses and selling furniture, and those who took their own lives in despair. Then, of course, there were the fortunate few who rebounded. Notably, director Elia Kazan who ratted out his peers and saw a decline in respect and success, Dalton Trumbo who bounced back by “fronting” (more on that later), and Walter Bernstein, who returned with the help of a young friend named Sidney Lumet.
Lumet hired Bernstein to write a script about kept women and their sugar daddies in 1959’s That Kind of Woman, with Sophia Loren as the lead. Everything about the film pushed risks: a daring story, a daring director, and a daring choice to bring out a blacklisted writer. To borrow some words of another bigoted Titan of the Senate, nevertheless, they persisted. Bernstein’s career was relaunched with a tremendous force.
1961’s Paris Blues (a personal favorite of yours truly), explored the romances of two blues musicians, one Black and one White, living and performing in Paris while falling in love with two American tourists. Black and White people were rarely seen on screen in an intimate capacity without at least some subservience. Yet, Bernstein wrote a double-date love story that defied norms and spilled with excitement and passion.
Several more scripts followed and while the jobs kept coming, Bernstein never let go of the contempt for government and its treatment towards communists. He had officially left the Communist Party in 1956, after the Soviet Union invaded Hungary and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev admitted the abuses of Joseph Stalin, but, as he wrote in his 1996 autobiography Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist:
“I had left the Party, but not the idea of socialism. the possibility that there could be a system not based on inequality and exploitation.”
In 1976 that Bernstein chose to lambaste the very people and process that ended his peers and nearly destroyed him. Thus brings us to The Front, directed by and starring Woody Allen. What is the “front”? I mentioned earlier it would come back up. The act of “fronting” meant using non-blacklisted writers to take the credit for the labor of a blacklisted writer, who, in return would receive no credit. In the film, Woody Allen portrays a cashier who “fronts” for banished writers. His experiences playing a phony author, however, encourage him to take a stand to defend the victims.
Bernstein used his own life experiences to add authenticity to the film, culminating in one giant red middle-finger to the motion picture industry. All that was missing was a tattoo on the proverbial bird that read, “we haven’t forgotten”.
Perhaps it was said authenticity, the unabashed vigor of a risk-taking writer, or the industry’s Liberal Guilt that earned him his only Academy Award nomination for that film.
What Walter Bernstein has left behind is a story of unapologetic heroism; a second chance used to advance not only ideas, but what stories shown on film could be about. The common folk seen only from an upward angle was explored and given a breath of life and character. Bernstein advanced his cause through his art. He must be remembered for his defiance and determination to raise the voice of equality.
