WALTER BERNSTEIN

(20 August 1919 - 23 January 2021)

The screenwriter Walter Bernstein was famous for being involved in the House UnAmerican Activities Committee blacklistings. HUAC, scared stiff of finding ‘Reds under the bed’ in American life, held hearings investigating Hollywood personnel, many of whom were by nature Socialists but, according to HUAC that meant Communists. All in all the number of blacklisted actors, directors, screenwriters and so on amounted to over three hundred, including Charles Chaplin, Paul Robeson, Ring Lardner Jr, Orson Welles, Dalton Trumbo and E.Y. Harburg. Among them was Walter Bernstein, who has died in Manhattan from pneumonia, aged 101. This meant that he had to work on the film All the King’s Men (1947) and others without a credit. After the crisis was over he was employed by producer Harold Hecht on Kiss the Blood Off My Hands. Subsequently he worked on television until 1959 when he wrote Sidney Lumet’s That Kind of Woman, with Sophia Loren, and George Cukor’s Heller in Pink Tights, also with Loren. However, he still remained uncredited for The Wonderful Country, The Magnificent Seven and The Train, but for the most part he could put his name to A Breath of Scandal (with Loren again), Paris Blues, Fail Safe, The Money Trap and The Molly Maguires. In 1976 he wrote and was Oscar-nominated for The Front, Martin Ritt’s film based on the activities of HUAC in which Woody Allen acts as a ‘front’ man for a blacklisted writer trying to work in Hollywood. It also starred Zero Mostel who was in real life blacklisted along with some of the other actors, the director and Bernstein himself who remained a very successful writer of Semi-Tough, Yanks (Bafta nominated), Little Miss Marker, The House on Carroll Street and The Couch Trip, as well as several TV series including Hidden, with Philip Glenister and Anna Chancellor for the BBC, his last work (in 2011). Walter Bernstein was born to an immigrant family in Brooklyn and was married four times, to the yoga teacher Marva Spelman, the actresses Barbara Lane and Judith Braun and the literary agent Gloria Loomis. He had two children with his first wife and three with his third. He wrote his autobiography, Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist, in 1996.

MICHAEL DARVELL