[ The conformity of 1950s film and television was the result of
the successful McCarthyist purge of leftists — and their genres —
from the entertainment industry. The life of socialist screenwriter
Very Caspary shows how it was done and what was lost.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

HOW HOLLYWOOD’S ANTI-COMMUNIST CRACKDOWN MADE TV AND MOVIES BLAND
AND BORING  
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Eileen Jones
June 8, 2023
Jacobin
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_ The conformity of 1950s film and television was the result of the
successful McCarthyist purge of leftists — and their genres — from
the entertainment industry. The life of socialist screenwriter Very
Caspary shows how it was done and what was lost. _

ctress Gene Tierney and Vincent Price in Laura., (Donaldson
Collection / Getty Images)

 

The current Writers Guild of America strike reminds us of the lasting
effects of major political and labor action in the entertainment
industry on the kind of material that gets produced. The most dramatic
instance of this is, of course, the 1950s McCarthyist red-baiting,
which resulted in the Hollywood blacklist. Not only did the
anti-communist witch hunts directly alter the course of hundreds of
lives, but they also radically impacted film and television as a
medium — and, consequently, the whole culture.

The conformity and conservatism of the 1950s were manifest across all
mainstream media, but especially in sanitized television shows
celebrating the American, white, middle-class nuclear family —
think _Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best_, and _The Adventures
of Ozzie and Harriet_. These shows imprinted themselves on the
conservative political imagination. When politicians urge us, as
Ronald Reagan did when first running for president, to “make America
great again,” the ideal in their minds is the one modeled by these
fantasy shows.

But contrary to popular understanding, the conservatism of the ’50s
isn’t simply “old-fashioned.” It came on the heels of a somewhat
more progressive period in film and television, which drew to a close
with the intensification of Hollywood red-baiting.

The life of novelist and filmmaker Vera Caspary demonstrates the
shift. A woman and a socialist, Caspary always had to face down
censorship, even before the second Red Scare. But as her story shows,
the blacklist was something more comprehensive and insurmountable, not
only derailing individual careers but killing entire genres that lent
themselves to social critique.

Before the Blacklist

In her 2018 book _The Broadcast 41:_ _Women and the Anti-communist
Blacklist, _Carol A. Stabile describes the life and career
trajectories of the forty-one women, mainly writers and actors, who
were blacklisted or graylisted during the witch hunt era of the late
1940s and ’50s.

The stories of blacklisted and graylisted men are more well known.
They included writers like Dalton Trumbo, Dashiell Hammett, and
Langston Hughes; directors like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles;
actors like John Garfield and Burgess Meredith; singers like Paul
Robeson and Pete Seeger; composers like Leonard Bernstein, and roughly
a hundred more.

The culture is far less familiar with blacklisted and graylisted
women’s stories, though there were several dozen of them. Many of
them built major careers in the 1930s and ’40s only to be
professionally derailed by anti-communist fanatics. These women all
fell somewhere on the political spectrum then termed
“progressive,” which spanned from committed “reds,” i.e.,
Communists and socialists, through left-leaning “pinks,” who
joined organizations and supported causes like labor unions, racial
justice, refugee rights, and opposition to the international rise of
fascism.

 

Among their ranks were writers Dorothy Parker, Lillian Hellman, and
Vera Caspary; writer-actor Ruth Gordon; actors Judy Holliday, Lee
Grant, Anne Revere, Rose Hobart, Marsha Hunt, Jean Muir, Aline
MacMahon, Fredi Washington, Pert Kelton, and Margo; legendary acting
teachers as well as actors Uta Hagen and Stella Adler; singers Lena
Horne and Hazel Scott; and entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee.

Given the racial hatred, antisemitism, and xenophobia underpinning so
much of the anti-Communist witch hunt, it was no coincidence that, of
the forty-one women blacklisted, more than a third were Jewish. Four
— Horne, Scott, Washington, and composer Shirley Graham Du Bois
(second wife of W. E. B. Du Bois) — were black women. One, Margo,
was Mexican-American. Sabile writes, “Most of the women listed
in _Red Channels_” — the main publication associated with the
ensuing blacklist, created in 1950 by three anti-communist idealogues
and ex-FBI agents — “were from working class or immigrant
backgrounds (sometimes both).”

Almost all of the women were New York City–based, though many wound
up doing stints in Hollywood. They were often friends and colleagues
with each other, and many were members of the same Popular Front
organizations and supporters of the same causes. They’d made great
strides on the stage and in radio and films, and were very hopeful
about a progressive future for the new medium of television.

Television, a mass medium with the potential to reach into the homes
of who knew how many millions of viewers, became a hard-fought
battleground — one that reflected the broader political dynamics of
the time period. Ultimately, the bland and blinding traditionalism of
so much 1950s television is a result of the era’s successful assault
on political progressives. As Sabile notes, “Contrary to popular
belief, the images that appeared on American television after 1950
were not simply reflections of American culture. They were products of
suppression, fear, and eventually self-censorship.”

Caspary’s trajectory illustrates both the victories progressive
women secured before the ’50s and the erosion of those achievements.
Caspary’s writing career was dedicated to representing the life
experiences of single, independent women such as herself, reflected
most strikingly in Laura Hunt, protagonist of her sensationally
successful novel _Laura_.

Caspary had what Sabile called an “anti-romance” tendency in her
writing, a refusal to deal in clichéd love-and-marriage plots
combined with a bracing frankness about the active sex lives of single
working women. Caspary herself, in her life and in her
autobiography _The Secrets of Grown-Ups_, was open about her
innumerable love affairs. She didn’t wed until she was in her
forties, and as her Austrian-American film producer husband Isadore
Goldsmith’s career faltered, she took over the breadwinner role
throughout their long and happy marriage.

Caspary came from a prosperous family of German-Jewish and
Russian-Jewish immigrants, and her father and grandfather were both
self-proclaimed socialists. As Caspary put it in her autobiography,
“The skeleton in my closet carries a hammer and sickle.”

Ultimately, the bland and blinding traditionalism of so much 1950s
television is a result of the era’s successful assault on political
progressives.

When her father went bankrupt in the 1920s, Caspary undertook to
support not only herself but also her mother by “pounding money out
of a typewriter.” She claimed to have been politically radicalized
by the Depression, as many were. But her investment in progressive
causes was manifest in her writing from the beginning. Her first novel
was a sympathetic account of the life of a young black woman who could
pass for white, called _The White Girl_ (1929), which was
well-received in the black press.

She was a member of the Communist Party of the USA for a few years,
but felt uncomfortable with doctrinaire party membership, and quit
after Stalin’s nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler in 1939. But she
continued to be active in Popular Front causes, all of which were
listed in the dossier of accusations presented to her when she was
called into a studio executive’s office at MGM in 1951.

Though she was fortunate in never being called to testify before House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and thus was never
blacklisted outright, studio fears that her left-wing past would come
out led executives to phase out the career of one of their highest
paid writers — a textbook case of graylisting, which was just as
devastating as blacklisting only more insidious. Caspary and her
husband fled to Europe for years, and fortunately she was able to keep
them both going financially, mainly through her work as a popular
novelist.

 

If we look at two films based on Caspary’s books, we can see
indications of the political climate’s impact on her career. One was
her greatest success, _Laura_ (1944), which was in production in the
early 1940s during World War II when film noir, with its built-in
critique of American society, was on the rise, along with what seemed
then to be a progressive political arc. _Laura_, with its vivid,
unreliable voice-over narration, extensive flashback structure, and an
ambiguous femme fatale figure in the central role, helped define the
form. It was one of the backlog of early American noirs received with
rapture by French film critics at the end of World War II, when they
named the new genre they saw developing.

The other Caspary adaptation, _The Blue Gardenia_ (1953), based on
Caspary’s novella _The Gardenia_, was also a film noir, made late
in the genre’s main cycle of films. It was made during the depths of
the blacklist, when Caspary had already fled the country to escape the
attentions of HUAC. Though it’s a generally excellent film made by
Fritz Lang, it was badly received and hardly created a ripple. The
number of noirs in production during the 1950s was dwindling under the
impact of censorship focused on eradicating “subversive” material
in films.

Gene Tierney as Laura in the eponymous 1944 film. (20th Century Fox)

Even getting _Laura_ made was no picnic, and that was during the
“prosperous and tolerant” 1940s that Caspary claimed all Hollywood
leftists of her generation felt nostalgic for. Director Otto
Preminger, overseeing the adaptation, insisted
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the lead character had no substance and was only a cipher invested
with importance by the male fantasies swirling around her: “She’s
nothing, a nonentity.” This statement enraged Caspary, whose book
was meant to be a celebration of a thirty-year-old career women
leading an exciting, independent, sexually active life, which stirs up
a whirlwind of murderous desire and envy around her.

Even the famous painted portrait of Laura, in Caspary’s description
is nothing like the sweet, winsome, romantic portrait of pliant
twentysomething Gene Tierney in the movie. Instead, it emphasizes the
besotted male painter’s failure to capture her essence, except for
two qualities: her tilted fawn-like eyes and, as Waldo Lydecker —
the waspish, erudite columnist and radio star obsessed with Laura —
put it, “the fluid sense of restlessness in the position of her
body, perched on the arm of the chair, a pair of yellow gloves in one
hand, a green hunter’s hat in the other.” Note the evocation of
helpless prey (the fawn eyes) and predator (the hunter’s cap) as a
way of indicating Laura’s complexity, which keeps the reader
thinking of her as both possible murderer and possible murderer’s
victim.

When detective Mark McPherson wonders why Laura wasn’t married
considering she “wasn’t a bad-looking dame,” Lydecker says,
“Marriage wasn’t her career. She had her career, she made plenty
of money, and there were always men to squire and admire her.”

Caspary borrowed elements from Wilkie Collins’s novels _The Woman
in White_ and _The Moonstone, _such as the device of examining a
murder mystery through the contradictory first-person accounts of
those suspected of or investigating a murder. She included among the
various men’s accounts a major section drawn from Laura’s diary,
confessing how she was trying to navigate not only her own shifting
desires but the frightening hostility and manipulative behaviors
underlying the desires of the men surrounding her.

As Caspary put it in her autobiography, ‘The skeleton in my closet
carries a hammer and sickle.’

Caspary, who clearly based the main character on herself, had heated
arguments with Preminger about the first draft of the script,
especially what he was doing to the character of Laura, “turning her
into the Hollywood version of a cute career girl.” There was nearly
a public brawl over the film when Caspary and Preminger happened to
meet at the Stork Club after its triumphant opening.

Nevertheless, Caspary claimed to have liked the rewritten script and
the way the film ultimately turned out, insisting that Preminger had
at least partly incorporated her point of view, though he denied it
vociferously. Caspary lost some battles. For example, Laura’s
first-person narration was never used in the film; only the character
who turns out to be the killer, Lydecker, provides voice-over
narration, in the extended flashback sequence describing an extremely
biased version of his relationship with Laura. Still, it’s a great
film, and retains at least some of what Caspary meant to convey about
Laura’s struggle to maintain a coherent sense of herself in a world
defined by men.

After the Blacklist

The success of _Laura_ kept Caspary writing noirish murder
mysteries, and she sold her novella _The Gardenia_ (1952) to Warner
Brothers Studio almost immediately upon publication. The film title
was changed to _The Blue Gardenia_ to evoke the 1947 “Black
Dahlia” murder of aspiring Hollywood actor Elizabeth Short, thus
evoking a notorious case of misogynistic fury that riveted the public.

Like _Laura_, _The Gardenia_ is also about a young working woman
who becomes a suspect in a murder, but in this case, the murder is
motivated by a man’s date-rape attempt, and the protagonist really
did it, accidentally killing him while trying to fight him off. Called
Agnes in the book and Norah in the 1953 film (played by Anne Baxter),
she’s a telephone operator, one of dozens working a huge Los Angeles
switchboard. She’s living in a cramped apartment with female
housemates who have much more exciting sex lives than she does. In the
book, Agnes is a mousy, repressed, fearful young woman who was raised
in a religious household, doesn’t drink, never goes out on dates,
and deplores what she sees as her friends’ obsession with men.
Eventually loneliness drives her out on the date that ends so
disastrously.

 

In the film, Norah’s homebody ways are attributed to her total
dedication to her boyfriend who’s off fighting the Korean War, and
it’s only a “Dear Jane” rejection letter from him that sends her
out on a date with the notorious ladies’ man Harry Prebble (Raymond
Burr). Drunk on too many cocktails pressed on her by Prebble, she
doesn’t remember actually killing him.

She’s tormented by guilt and terror as the murder investigation is
given lurid coverage in all the newspapers, and she falls for the
appeals of a newspaper columnist (Richard Conte) who writes a
“Letter to an Unknown Murderess,” offering to help the anonymous
young woman about to be arrested by police. He has no intention of
really helping her, but winds up falling in love with her anyway,
because she’s so different from the type of scarlet woman he
expected to meet. But then, so is Harry Prebble’s quiet, desperate,
pregnant ex-girlfriend (Ruth Storey) who works a similarly underpaid
job as a record store clerk and, it turns out, actually killed Prebble
in a bitter encounter after Norah ran from the apartment.

Anne Baxter as Norah in Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia (1952).
(Warner Brothers)

Cleared of murder charges, Norah emerges from jail and seems to reject
the overtures of the betraying newspaper columnist as she passes him
by, accompanied by her roommates. There’s actually a thrilling
moment of female solidarity implied by their striding off together —
right before Norah confides to them that she’s only “playing hard
to get” as they advised. She intends to make the newspaperman work
for her forgiveness. This is the tacked-on romantic happy ending so
sadly familiar to admirers of film noir. The film ends on the
newspaper columnist’s confident smirk as he watches Norah walk off.

From the screenplay, you’d never know that Caspary’s original
story is about the storm of male hostility toward independent working
women with sex lives. Date-rape and murder and corrupt betrayal are
not treated as serious subjects, but light shots fired in “the
battle of the sexes.”

Fritz Lang made something nicely disturbing of it, however. He leans
into the jokey, sprightly tone, so at odds with the subject matter, in
a way that produces a jarring and eerie dissonance. Combined with the
characteristic film noir shooting style by master of shadow-play
Nicholas Musuraca (_Cat People_ [1942]_, The Locket_ [1946],_ Out
of the Past_ [1947]), Lang achieves a more deranged affect than if he
hadn’t been pushed into such tonal contradictions. Lang actually
does something similar in dealing with murderous male misogyny
in _While the City Sleeps_ (1956) as well, which together with _The
Blue Gardenia_ and _Beyond a Reasonable Doubt_ (1956), comprise his
unsettling “newspaper trilogy” of the 1950s.

Caspary’s novella _The Gardenia_ ends quite differently than the
film, with the newspaperman refusing to believe a young woman he’s
attracted to could possibly have killed Harry Prebble. But she admits
it, and becomes a kind of public heroine in confessing to the murder
she committed and facing the consequences. By then she’s transformed
herself, dyed her hair and changed her appearance in earlier attempts
to escape police detection, and found it unexpectedly liberating as
she leaves her timid self-image behind. In finally “confronting good
and evil” instead of hiding from all possibility of “sin,”
she’s cast off her mother’s fear-filled religiosity and become an
adult.

Caspary makes no mention at all of _The Blue Gardenia_ in her
autobiography, though Lang was a friend of hers and her husband’s.
Lang himself didn’t seem to remember it with any affection, though
he loved Anne Baxter’s performance in the lead role. When Peter
Bogdanovich in his book _Fritz Lang in America_ was struck by the
“venomous picture of American life” created by the film, Lang
responded that he was probably feeling venomous because he had only
twenty days to shoot the tightly budgeted movie. And besides, it was
“my first picture after the McCarthy business,” which included the
flight of his friends to Europe to escape persecution. To say the
least, the blacklist made Hollywood a nightmarish place to live and
work, even for the nominally successful. In 1960, Lang himself went
back to Germany to make his last films.

Lang himself didn’t remember it with any affection, recalling that
it was ‘my first picture after the McCarthy business.’

Though the film noir genre was on the wane, it managed to keep going
through the 1950s, often using devices that placated the censors.
Writers and directors resorted to common tactics like the sudden,
unconvincing happy endings that seemed to restore “normalcy,” take
back critiques of American society, and show through strained
narrative twists that the protagonist was actually innocent all along,
so that the “real villain” could be punished with either death or
arrest.

Framing devices were also popular in “semi-documentary” film noir
variations that celebrated crime-busting authority figures, sometimes
with formal tributes to the heroic “G-men” of the FBI, and to
police officers of the New York Police Department, the Los Angeles
Police Department, and the San Francisco Police Department. The whole
middle of these movies could be even darker, harsher, and more
violent, labyrinthian, and reflective of American societal malaise
than 1940s noir, as long as the framing device made the case that the
system worked to keep all those disturbing forces in check.

With her success tied to the startling 1940s popularity of film noir,
the most subversive of all genres, it’s no wonder Caspary’s
Hollywood career dwindled with it — and that the genre itself, with
its bracing tendency to look into the dark heart of American culture,
could be counted as yet another casualty of the blacklist.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Eileen Jones is a film critic at _Jacobin_ and author of _Filmsuck,
USA_. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck
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