Bright, John

BRIGHT, JOHN (1908-1989). The “tough proletarian” of the Hollywood Left, Bright had a limited career with some notable successes, and a political life as one of the writers who successfully captured issues of class-struggle.

Born in New York, attending the New School at the time of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, he swore to become a tough guy writer of film, but returned from Hollywood to Chicago in failure. There, he worked in a drugstore that operated as a speak-easy, selling alcohol on the side, with the owner and his collaborator, Kubec Glasman. The two wrote a novel about Chicago’s organized crime, and returned to Hollywood, certain they could create a film adaptation. The result, Public Enemy (1932) with James Cagney, became more than an over-night classic: it was more popular than Little Caesar, as the two established the genre of crime film for millions of film-goers and a handful of shrewd studio insiders.

Crazy Blonde, shot soon after, pairing Joan Blondell with James Cagney, offered a brilliant statement of proletarian cynicism, but did less business. Bright’s hostility to the studio bosses cost him dearly even as it led him toward the Communist Party. Bright became deeply involved in the defense cases of the time, Tom Mooney to the Scottsboro case. Severely critical of Party approaches and unwilling to accept them, Bright was best known in Hollywood as a political “sport,” socially and politically active with his wife, Josefina Fierro de Bright, the leading Chicana Communist of Southern California movements.

His many small credits and co-credits of the 1930s include She Done Him Wrong (1933) with Mae West, The Accusing Finger (1936), a drama aimed against capital punishment, and the utterly unique Back Door to Heaven (1939), an emphatically Christian socialist saga of a wanderer who loses everything and turns to crime, but returns to his home town, his teacher, and classmates who span the full scale of class relations in the US. These former classmates act out class relations again, under stressful conditions. Near the end of his Hollywood time, Bright co-scripted Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), reveling the British ruling class as pro-Nazi, and The Kid From Cleveland (1949), baseball story of the Cleveland Indians that included Early Winn and Satchel Page in walk-on parts. Blacklisted soon after, he lived long enough to cooperate with Dalton Trumbo in the film adaptation of Trumbo’s famed anti-war novel, Johnny Got His Gun (1971).

McGilligan, Patrick, and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.