Screenwriter Walter Bernstein, one of the last survivors of Hollywood’s anti-communist black list, whose Oscar-nominated script for The Front was based on his years of inability to work under his own name, died at the age of 101.
His wife, literary agent Gloria Loomis, said he died of pneumonia.
World War II correspondent for the military who had also been published in The New Yorker, Bernstein was at the beginning of what looked like a promising film career when the cold war and anti-communist paranoia led him to be blacklisted in 1950, a destination that ruined the lives of many of his colleagues and led some to suicide.
“I was starting to look around when I left the house, looking over my shoulder as I walked down the street, preparing for the inevitable encounter,” he wrote in his memoir Inside Out, published in 1996.
“Even though I expected this, I was surprised when it came, and I felt the bitter taste of fear for a moment and then a wave of shameful anger, not at them, but at myself, for being afraid. I could never be mad at them. They were just doing their job, like delivering milk. “
Not wanting to provide the Chamber’s Non-American Activities Committee with the names of alleged communists, just as director Elia Kazan and others were spared the ban, Bernstein found employment through the use of “fronts”, people willing to lend their names for the scripts he had written.
Although many were blacklisted just for supporting left-wing causes, Bernstein was actually a member of the American Communist Party and remained so until 1956. Bernstein would remember his decision with “relief” that he no longer followed Soviet dogma and “sadness” to the people who were idealistic companions.
“I had left the party, but not the idea of socialism,” he wrote in his memoirs, “the possibility that there could be a system not based on inequality and exploitation.”
The blacklist began to fade in the late 1950s and ended for Bernstein in 1959 with That Kind of Woman, starring Sophia Loren. He was soon working on The Magnificent Seven, the Hollywood adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai, and Marilyn Monroe’s last film that never ended, Something’s Gotta Give.
In the 1970s, Bernstein was able to use his own story for what became his most acclaimed project, The Front, starring Woody Allen as a replacement for the blacklisted writers and featuring Bernstein’s friend Zero Mostel, who had also been ostracized in the 1950s. Bernstein received an Oscar nomination in 1977 and a Writers Guild of America award for best screen drama. At about the same time, Allen gave him a cameo in Oscar winner Annie Hall.
His other credits as a writer included the football comedy by Burt Reynolds Semi-Tough and films by old friends like Martin Ritt and Sidney Lumet. Bernstein himself directed Little Miss Marker, a 1980 release based on the tale by Damon Runyon.
In 1994, he received an award for the work of the Screen Writers’ Guild. At the age of 90, he taught screenwriting at New York University and was an advisor to the Sundance Institute film school, founded by Robert Redford.
Bernstein was married four times, most recently to Loomis, and had five children. Throughout his long life, he also enjoyed an eclectic range of friends and acquaintances, from authors Irwin Shaw and Shirley Jackson to composer Irving Berlin and Bette Davis, who, Bernstein was surprised to learn, shared his admiration for the writings of Karl Marx .
A descendant of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Bernstein was born and raised in New York City and as a teenager he had found his passion for cinema and politics. In his spare time, he read Marx and Engels, Steinbeck and Dreiser, and looked for films by Sergei Eisenstein and other Russian directors.
“The books opened my head,” he wrote. “Movies opened my heart.”