The Hollywood Left and the Blacklist Era

Private Property - Joseph Losey's The Prowler by Matt Zoller Seitz 
at The L Magazine, March 2010
(also see Justin Stewart's essay on this film in the same issue)

A ghost town also frames the haunting final scenes of Joseph Losey's The Prowler, when an adulterous couple (Evelyn Keyes and Van Heflin) take refuge in an abandoned Mojave desert village so that the woman can secretly give birth to their child. Webb killed Susan Gilvray's husband, successfully making it look like an accident, and he fears that proof of their affair will put him under suspicion.

He's a shady, disaffected cop who first meets Susan when he responds to her report of a prowler. She's a lonely housewife whose husband is an all-night DJ, a disembodied voice on the radio, unable to provide her with the child she craves. Webb takes one look at the wistful blonde and her luxurious Spanish-style suburban palace and decides he wants both. Reluctantly Susan succumbs to his aggressive persistence, as he keeps turning up to investigate an imaginary intruder, finally gunning down her husband, ostensibly by mistake. Fragile and passive, Susan believes Webb's story and marries him; their wedding is mirrored by a funeral at the church across the street.

Isolated in the desert ruin, Susan struggles through a difficult labor. The refuge turns deadly, with dust storms raging, and in desperation Webb finally fetches a doctor to save his wife, and she learns the truth about him when she realizes he plans to kill the man who saved her. The setting is appropriate: though they conceived a child, their relationship built on greed and deception is more barren than Susan's first, childless marriage.   Imogen Sara Smith, 'In Lonely Places: Film Noir Outside the City', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 65, August 2009 [my emphasis]

Film Studies For Free, a born "fellow traveller" blog if ever there was one, today brings you some choice links to high quality material pertaining to the study of the Hollywood Blacklist era.

The post begins with Matt Zoller Seitz's latest video essay - a wonderful dissection of Joseph Losey's 1951 film noir thriller The Prowler. This was one of the last films Losey made in Hollywood before fleeing the US, refusing to inform on his friends to the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Zoller Seitz compellingly teases out The Prowler's concerns with social class and property; these would become even more central themes in Losey's film work after his exile to England.  

• Peter Biskind, 'Hollywood, the Blacklist, the Cold War The way they were', from Jump Cut, no. 1, 1974
• Dan Callahan, 'Joseph Losey', Senses of Cinema, February 2003
• J.M. Caparros-Lera and Sergio Alegre, 'Cinematic Contextual History of High Noon (1952, dir. Fred Zinnemann)', Film-Historia, VoI. VI, No.1 (1996): 37-61
• 'Dossier: An Interview with Albert Ruben', Film Studies, Volume 7 (Winter 2005) 
• 'Dossier: An Interview with Cy Endfield', Film Studies, Volume 7 (Winter 2005)
• Arthur Eckstein, 'The Hollywood Ten in history and memory', Film History, Volume 16, pp. 424-436, 2004 
• David Eldridge, 'Hollywood Censors History', 49th Parallel, Vol.20 (Winter 2006-2007)
• Myron Coureval Fagan, Red stars in Hollywood: Their helpers, fellow travelers, and co-conspirators (1948) 
• Jack R. Fischel, Reds and Radicals In Hollywood [review of Radical Hollywood, by Paul Buhle and David Wagner. The New Press. And Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s, by Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley]', Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2003
• Dan Gilbert, Moscow over Hollywood (1948) 
• Saverio Giovacchini, 'Introduction: Taking Hollywood Seriously', Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal (Temple University Press, 2001)
• Sam B. Girgus, 'Hollywood and American Politics: The Play's the Thing [Review of RONALD REAGAN IN HOLLYWOOD: Movies and Politics. By Stephen Vaughn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1994.]', American Studies,
• Heather Heckman, 'Gray or Black? Howard Koch and the Elusive Architecture of the Hollywood “Lists”', Mediascape, Fall 2008
• John Hess and Chuck Kleinhans, 'Reds on Reds', from Jump Cut, no. 28, April 1983
• Jake Hinkson, 'At the center of the storm: He Ran All the Way and the Hollywood Blacklist', Noir City Sentinel, Nov/Dec 2009
• Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw, 'Negotiating the Studio System: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Anti-Fascism in Cornered', Film Studies, Volume 7 (Winter 2005)
• Karen McNally, '"Sinatra, Commie Playboy": Frank Sinatra, Postwar Liberalism and Press Paranoia', Film Studies, Volume 7 (Winter 2005)
• Steve Neale, 'Swashbucklers and Sitcoms, Cowboys and Crime, Nurses, Just Men and Defenders: Blacklisted Writers and TV in the 1950s and 1960s', Film Studies, Volume 7 (Winter 2005) 
• Brian Neve, 'The Hollywood Left: Robert Rossen and Postwar Hollywood', Film Studies, Volume 7 (Winter 2005)
• Erica Sheen, 'Un-American: Dmytryk, Rossellini and Christ in Concrete', Film Studies, Volume 7 (Winter 2005)
• Imogen Sara Smith, 'In Lonely Places: Film Noir Outside the City', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 65, August 2009 
• Jeff Smith, 'Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been A Christian?: The Strange History Of The Robe As Political Allegory', Film Studies, Volume 7 (Winter 2005)
• Peter Stanfield, 'A Monarch for the Millions: Jewish Filmmakers, Social Commentary and the Postwar Cycle of Boxing Films', Film Studies, Volume 7 (Winter 2005)
• Brad Stevens, 'Review of A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky And The Hollywood Left by Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner (University of California Press, 2001)', Senses of Cinema, Issue 15, 2001