Lardner, Ring JR.

LARDNER, RING JR. (1915-2000). A leading Left talent in Hollywood’s Screen Writers Guild during the 1930s–1940s, Ring Lardner, Jr., might be considered the member of the “Hollywood Ten” whose revenge against political repression was most complete. In M*A*S*H, whose film script he wrote, and on which the television series was based, Lardner helped to launch one of the most popular of anti-war epics in the American popular culture and to bridge the gap between the ideals of the Old Left and the sentiments of the New.

Son of the famous humorist and short story writer, Lardner, Jr., went to work for David O. Selznick in 1935 at the age of twenty, and joined John Howard Lawson and others in the Left-led effort to organize a screenwriters’ union. He accumulated few important credits over the next few years. He broke through as coauthor of Woman of the Year, starring Katherine Hepburn. This unusual drama allowed Hepburn to make speeches on woman’s rights, while costar Spencer Tracy grumbled. Lardner shared an Oscar in 1942 for his accomplishment.

Subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947, Lardner became one of the “Hollywood Ten” who, after declining to answer the committee’s questions, were prosecuted for contempt of Congress and formally blacklisted by a resolution of the Motion Picture Producers’ Association. When the Supreme Court decided in 1950 not to review their case and the convicted men went to various federal prisons, Lardner served more than nine months. By a grand irony, one of his fellow inmates, convicted former Representative J. Parnell Thomas, had been one of his interrogators. A decade later, in “My Life on the Blacklist,” written for the Saturday Evening Post, he defended the right of free speech and association in the entertainment industry. He had, in fact, left the Communist Party in the early 1950s, but remained active in movements against political repression and continued writing for such Left publications as Mainstream. His first novel, The Ecstasy of Owen Muir (1954) and his extended memoir, The Lardners: My Family Remembered (1976), were critically well received.
Lardner wrote intermittently, under his own name or others, for a series of television shows and films. Episodes of Robin Hood and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot, both series filmed in Britain, provided his best opportunity on the small screen. As the Blacklist lifted, he scripted The Cincinnati Kid (1965). The Greatest (1977), a drama about Muhammad Ali, was rewritten and edited fom his original script, but full of the fire of the boxing champ’s resistance to the war in Vietnam.

M*A*S*H returned Lardner to the entertainment limelight and won him another screenwriting Oscar. A dark comedy about a US medical team in the Korean War, it mixed humor with semidocumentary style and delivered a devastating blow to right-wing patriotism. Pauline Kael, a bitterly anticommunist critic who credited director Robert Altman over the screenplay, nevertheless called it the “best American war comedy since sound” had been added to film. M*A*S*H owed its greatest popularity, however, to its political timeliness. Korea stood in for Vietnam, with the madness of the American presence in Southeast Asia presented clearly and forcefully. As television vehicle for Alan Alda, M*A*S*H became the most successful, the most sold in the most residual markets, series in the history of American television. Vindicated in his last years by the Screen Writers Guild and by the associated publicity around the victimized Hollywood Left, Lardner, Jr., remained a well-known personality in New York and a staunch leftwing figure to the end.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Hide in Plain Sight. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

Buhle, Paul and Dave Wagner. Radical Hollywood. New York: New Press, 2002.

Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in Hollywood. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Lardner, Jr. I’d Hate Myself in the Morning. New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 2000.

McGilligan, Patrick and Paul Buhle. Tender Comrades. New York: St. Martins, 1997.

Ring Lardner, Jr. Papers, 1920-2002. Academy Collections. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. http://catalog.oscars.org/vwebv/holdingsInfo?bibId=66288