No one invoked the Fifth Amendment at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s program “Jewish Americans and the Hollywood Blacklist.” At a crowded pre-program wine-and-cheese reception, everyone was talking.
“I’m very open about it,” said honoree Norma Barzman, 85, who went into self-imposed exile in France after being blacklisted in 1949. “I was a member of the Communist Party.”
Even being suspected of communist sympathies was enough for creative artists in Hollywood to find themselves unemployable back in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Barzman, along with fellow blacklisted Jewish writers Walter Bernstein and Dan Bessie, received the red-carpet treatment at the event, held Sunday, July 24 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco.
Bernstein wrote such films as “Fail Safe,” “The Molly Maguires” and “The Front” (a 1976 comedy about the blacklist starring Woody Allen and several former blacklisted actors).
Bernstein was introduced to the Castro Theatre audience by singer/actress Andrea Marcovicci, who co-starred in “The Front.” She recalled how at the time of casting, she was “25 years old and, you should excuse the expression, Catholic.”
She also recounted how Woody Allen, before shooting a kissing scene, told her, “I’m only going to give you one lip, because if I give you two, you’ll never live through it.”
When Bernstein then took the stage to accept the festival’s Freedom of Expression award, he said, “The only other time I got an award for being Jewish was at my bar mitzvah.”
He then elicited cheers and some jeers when he said the strength of Judaism is in the diaspora, and not in “building settlements on other people’s land.”
Following a screening of “The Front” (which drew a long ovation from the audience), Bernstein, Barzman and Bessie spoke at a panel moderated by Paul Buhle, a professor at Brown University.
Buhle has written several books on the blacklist and also wrote the program notes for the day’s events. In those notes he wrote, “Today we look back on the blacklistees as the bearers of an ancient tradition of Jewish suffering, but also a more recent tradition of struggling along with others hard-pressed.”
However, Bessie, whose blacklisted father Alvah Bessie was one of the famed Hollywood Ten, noted that “a lot of Jewish producers in Hollywood went along with the blacklist.”
Barzman added, “There’s a connection between our exile and the words ‘exile of the Jews.’ My husband [late screenwriter Ben Barzman] felt so keenly the rejection of America. We all came out of it, but not without hurt.”
Bernstein noted, “The blacklist was a small part of what was going on in this country at the time. It was an adjunct of the Cold War.”
He also added, “There are things I miss [about the blacklist]. The community of blacklisted people and their friends tried to help each other.”
A brief question-and-answer period followed, most of the questions coming from sympathetic left-leaning audience members.
Yet the final question came from someone in the Castro Theatre balcony, someone apparently not so enthralled with the blacklistees or their political views.
The questioner wanted to know if the panelists had been under the sway of former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin during their days in the Communist Party and if they realized he was responsible for murdering millions of people.
Recalling his own days as a member of the party, Bessie replied, “We went to a lot of boring meetings.”