Hollywood Review

HOLLYWOOD REVIEW. The motion picture blacklistees fought against their plight from the very beginning. The Hollywood Arts, Sciences and Professions, the small group of movie-industry Communists who remained in the Party, picketed the hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which it held in Los Angeles, in September 1951. The blacklistees, individually and collectively filed ten court cases. They contributed to California Quarterly, an arts journal co-founded by Philip Stevenson. They, Dalton Trumbo foremost among them, gave many speeches and wrote many pamphlets and articles. They produced Salt of the Earth in the face of massive resistance from cold warriors. And they published a unique radical journal of film.

The co-editors of the Hollywood Review related different stories about how the journal started. Helen Levitt remembered that on a day, in 1953, a group of motion picture blacklistees were sitting around talking, when one asked, “why don’t we put out a newspaper?” Someone else responded, “let’s do it.” And so, following in the footsteps of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney (“let’s put on a show”), the Hollywood Review was born. But Sylvia Jarrico said it was Helen’s idea. She was tied down at home with two children who needed a great deal of attention and no money coming in. She wanted something useful to do, which she could do from home. As well, the journal would give meaningful work to other blacklistees. She was the one who pulled it together, making all the telephone calls.

Hollywood Review was sponsored by the Hollywood Arts, Sciences and Professions. Its editors planned to analyze current trends in movie content and developments in the motion picture and television industries. The two editors were experienced managers. Sylvia had been managing editor of the Hollywood Quarterly, a film journal published by the University of California, until she was fired for refusing to take the newly created state loyalty oath. Helen had been secretary of the Actors Lab, a leftwing theater production company. Michael Wilson, Alfred Levitt, and Adrian Scott, blacklisted screenwriters, were deeply involved.

As time went on, the editors organized a whole community of non-Hollywood people to help with makeup, printing, and circulation. It was mailed from the living room of Helen and Alfred Levitt. Two blacklisted newspapermen, Darr Smith and Holly Noble also contributed. The journal had about 1,000 subscribers, mostly blacklistees, academic types, and libraries. Ten issues were published between 1953 and 1956. Most issues were eight pages.

The journal printed articles on the blacklist, black employment in the motion picture industry, and racial themes in movies. Each issue featured a major review of current trends in film content. The contributors perceived a direct relationship between the growth of the blacklist and film content, particularly the prowar and ultra-violent movies being made. Wilson discussed the increasingly vicious tone of war movies and the changing nature of film; Al Levitt addressed the way current films demeaned blacks; John Howard Lawson criticized the antiworker theme of On the Waterfront. But the most significant article was penned by Sylvia Jarrico, a brilliant, path-breaking article on the depiction of women in cold-war films. “Something dreadful has happened to women on the screen,” she began. Though the majority of female characters continued to devote themselves to romantic and domestic goals, the minority, “the women of will . . . have undergone a spine-tingling change in the course of the cold war years.” She traced the evolution of the independent woman from silent films to World War II movies, and she concluded that in the postwar years, strong-willed women were being depicted as mortally dangerous persons: “Their lives and their sanity were often in the balance; alternatively they threatened the lives and sanity of their associates. . . . Some of them, very soon, were monstrously evil.” She argued that the complacent theme of submission as the natural state of women had been replaced by an aggressive theme, that submission is the necessary state of women. This transformation, she stated, had a political goal: “At a time when American women of varying classes represent a vast force, actual and potential, in preserving world peace, Hollywood’s sinister heroines constitute a sharpened attack on the opportunities and capacities of real women to take effective action on behalf of themselves, their families, and their nation.”

When I asked her if she was aware on how ground breaking her article was, she replied: “I thought it was good. I thought it had a lot of images in it that were memorable. And it was high-spirited, and I thought it was good to have something high-spirited for people to enjoy while they were reading.”

The final issue (June-July 1956) contained articles pointing to some positive trends in movie making: the demise of anti-Communist films, the decline of bloody war movies, and the increase of naturalistic television plays. In fact, the situation was improving, especially for writers, who were turning out dozens of scripts for the black market, several of which were nominated for Academy Awards, including The Brave One, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and The Defiant Ones. In 1960, when Trumbo was given screen credit for two hugely successful films, Exodus and Spartacus, the blacklist began to erode.

Ceplair, Larry. The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2007.

Hollywood Review, Arts Library, UCLA.

Jarrico, Sylvia, oral history, UCLA Oral History Program.

Levitt, Helen Slote, oral history, UCLA Center for Oral History Research. http://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu/Browse.do?descCvPk=28074

http://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu/Browse.do?descCvPk=28074