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Screenwriter Walter Bernstein, among the last survivors of Hollywood’s anti-Communist blacklist, whose Oscar-nominated screenplay for The Front drew on his years of inability to work under his own name, has died at the age of 101 years old.
His wife, literary agent Gloria Loomis, said he died of pneumonia.
A WWII military correspondent who was also published in The New Yorker, Bernstein was at the start of what appeared to be a promising film career when the Cold War and anti-Communist paranoia led to him being blacklisted in 1950. , a fate that ruined the lives of many of his peers and led some to suicide.
“I started to look around when I left my house, looking over my shoulder as I walked down the street, preparing for the inevitable encounter,” he wrote in his memoir Inside Out, published in 1996.
“Even as I expected it, I was surprised when it happened, and there was a sudden bitter taste of fear for a while, then a wave of shameful anger, not against them but against myself. to be afraid. I could never really get mad at them. They were just doing their job, like delivering milk.
Not wanting to provide the House Anti-American Activities Committee with the names of suspected Communists, how Director Elia Kazan and others had been spared from banishment, Bernstein found employment using “fronts”, people willing to lend their names for scripts he had written.
While many were blacklisted just to support left-wing causes, Bernstein was in fact a member of the American Communist Party and remained so until 1956. Bernstein would recall his decision with “relief” to no longer respect the Party. Soviet dogma and “sadness” for the people. who were idealistic companions.
“I had left the party, but not the idea of socialism,” he wrote in his memoir, “the possibility that there could be a system not based on inequality and exploitation”.
The blacklist started to weaken in the late 1950s and ended for Bernstein in 1959 with That Kind of Woman, starring Sophia Loren. He soon worked on The Magnificent Seven, the Hollywood adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai, and Marilyn Monroe’s last never-ending film, Something’s Gotta Give.
In the 1970s, Bernstein was able to use his own story for what became his most acclaimed project, The Front, starring Woody Allen as a stand-in for blacklisted writers and starring Bernstein’s friend. , Zero Mostel, who had also been ostracized in the 1950s. Bernstein received an Oscar nomination in 1977 and a Writers Guild of America award for best fiction. Around the same time, Allen gave him an acting cameo in Oscar-winning Annie Hall.
His other writing credits included the football comedy Burt Reynolds Semi-Tough and old friend films such as Martin Ritt and Sidney Lumet. Bernstein himself directed Little Miss Marker, a 1980 release based on the Damon Runyon short story.
In 1994 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Writers’ Guild. In his 90s, he taught screenwriting at New York University and was a counselor at the Sundance Institute Film School, founded by Robert Redford.
Bernstein married four times, most recently to Loomis, and had five children. During his long life he also benefited from an eclectic range of friends and acquaintances, from authors Irwin Shaw and Shirley Jackson to songwriter Irving Berlin and Bette Davis, who, Bernstein was surprised at. to learn, shared his admiration for the writings of Karl Marx.
A descendant of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Bernstein was born and raised in New York City and from his teenage years he found his passions for film and politics. In his spare time he read Marx and Engels, Steinbeck and Dreiser, and searched for films by Sergei Eisenstein and other Russian directors.
“The books opened my head,” he writes. “The films opened my heart.”
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