Communist Infiltration of Hollywood Motion-Picture Industry -- Part 3. Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Second Congress, First Session: May 22, 23, 24, 25; June 25 and 26, 1951

Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office. Near Fine. 1951. First Edition. Printed wraps. [very light external soiling, small piece torn away at bottom right corner of front cover]. Transcripts of the testimonies of five individuals, given before HUAC as part of its second major investigation into purported communist influence in Hollywood. (The first, in 1947, was what set in motion the practice of blacklisting suspected communists, which was in full swing by the early 1950s.) The witnesses whose testimonies are presented here were: actor José Ferrer; writer Budd Schulberg; director Frank Tuttle; director-writer Robert Rossen; and actor J. Edward Bromberg. The most interesting of the group are Schulberg and Rossen. Schulberg, in addition to singing like a canary (naming plenty of his one-time Communist associates by name, which of course was pretty much the point of this performative exercise), goes into great detail about his own political and professional past, especially with regard to the Party's highly critical response to his 1941 novel "What Makes Sammy Run?" Rossen, on the other hand, was an "unfriendly" witness (the worst sin of all), pleading his Fifth Amendment rights and refusing to name names, which (predictably) got him blacklisted. (He changed his tune when he returned for a second testimony in 1953, named dozens of names, and got himself un-blacklisted.) Schulberg (also predictably) not only avoided being blacklisted, but just a few years later won an Oscar for his screenplay of ON THE WATERFRONT, which has generally been seen as an apologia for "informers." (Of the other three witnesses, Ferrer and Tuttle were generally "friendly"; Tuttle had been blacklisted in 1947, but here "redeemed" himself by naming 36 names, while Bromberg was not just unfriendly but openly defiant, taking the Fifth multiple times. The stress of his testimony, which led to his own blacklisting, was said to have contributed to his death just six months later, at the age of 47.) . (Inventory #: 30083)