Red & Black :

A new book edited by Ehsan Khoshbakht that looks back at the careers of Hollywood blacklistees, published on the occasion of the 2026 Locarno Film Festival

READ THE INTRODUCTION

by Ehsan Khoshbakht

If you look at the career of classic-era Hollywood filmmakers and suddenly notice an unexplained void between the late 1940s and early 1960s in their filmography – especially when, up to that point, they had proved to be indefatigable workhorses – this could be a sign of what this book is about: the scourge of the Hollywood blacklist. It grounded hundreds of talents in American cinema and halted their careers for either a long stretch of time or, in some cases, until their dying day. In the case of presumed or existing ties of any kind, explicit or hidden, to communism or communists – in particular membership of the Communist Party USA – people were barred from being hired by major studios and television networks.

On one side, there were writers, directors, actors and other talents in the filmmaking process who, in the past or present, had been involved in progressive politics, campaigning and activism on various fronts, in particular the formation of independent unions and anti-fascist movements. They encompassed a broad range, from radical communists to friendly liberals. A handful of them, encouraged by the Roosevelt administration, had made openly pro-Soviet films to support the Allies’ shared goal of defeating fascism.

On the other, the broadly defined “right” – bipartisan and cross-party – included supporters of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which conducted a series of congressional hearings investigating Hollywood. They argued that communists wanted to seize Hollywood for its profits and its massive worldwide propaganda machine and from there to take over America.

With the televising of the HUAC hearings, the whole affair spiralled into public hysteria. Under the pretext of the Cold War, civil liberties were limited or taken away from some of the most politically engaged citizens. Most regretfully, if not unpredictably, Hollywood backed down and collaborated shamelessly to facilitate a purge. Hollywood effectively invented the blacklist.

This book is largely a study of the cinema of leftists who consciously, deliberately, and at times militantly, made films about the illusory promise of the American dream. They believed that cinema, the country’s most popular form of mass entertainment, should help America confront its dark side: a golden pyramid of power built on inequity, exploitation, and discrimination.

The book is organised into roughly three segments. The opening essay offers a general account of the Hollywood Left through to the New Left, with the blacklist episode in between – a stab in the back of the Left. The remaining pieces in the first part examine both the circumstances of the blacklistees (exile, women) and the genres through which they could provide allegorical readings of postwar America and their own fates (noir, western).

The second part studies the work of screenwriters – the most famous victims of the blacklist – while the final part, devoted to directors, completes this portrait of a period of hope and determination (1933–46) that, within months, dissolved into despair and moral anguish (1947–60).

The aim of the book is to show how politically incisive the films of the Hollywood Left were; how those ideas were translated into the language of cinema; and how the tortuous legacy of the blacklist from 1947 onwards shaped the work of those who managed to write and direct – whether at home or in exile, under their own names or pseudonyms.

The period examined in this book resonates strongly with today’s politics of retribution, in which those in power deploy methods of humiliation and dehumanisation against people with opposing views. As this book was being edited, signs of political catastrophe were everywhere: events around us unfolding too quickly to be processed, understood, or explained, while we are dragged hesitantly from one international crisis to the next. Political cynicism is experiencing an epic revival in America, a country whose perceived drift towards autocracy has shocked much of the world.

To borrow the words of leftist stage and screen writer and director Clifford Odets, there is a “shuddering echo” in the air, and the world is no longer the one we thought we knew – much like the world that suddenly became alien to American filmmakers in 1947. 

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