Walter Bernstein

Walter Bernstein

Walter Bernstein (20 August 1919) is an American screenwriter and film producer who was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios in the 1950s.

Biography

Early life

Bernstein was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Hannah (née Bistrong) and Louis Bernstein, a teacher. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1940. It was while attending Dartmouth in 1937 that he joined the Young Communist League.

Career and blacklist

Bernstein wrote for The New Yorker magazine. During World War II, he was a war correspondent for the U.S. Army newspaper Yank and, because of his communist affiliations, was given the chance to interview Josip Tito the leader of the Yugoslav communist partisans in 1944.

He wrote his first script for Hollywood in 1948 when he adapted a Gerald Butler novel to the screen. Bernstein has stated in his autobiography that while working at Columbia Pictures he would deliberately insert the Communist Party's viewpoint into his scripts in hope that these views would get by studio head Harry Cohn. In 1951, because of his communist ties, Bernstein was called to testify before HUAC. His uncooperative performance before the committee did little to stay the fears of the Hollywood producers and they subsequently blacklisted him along with several others making work difficult to find.

He did manage to get work with the help of sympathetic colleagues who hired him under a pseudonym. During this period he was able to earn some income writing scripts for television shows including 1953 television segments for You Are There, featuring Walter Cronkite.

The studio-enforced ban was lifted in 1959 when director Sidney Lumet hired him to write the screenplay for the Sophia Loren movie That Kind of Woman. From then on Bernstein was able to work openly on films such as Paris Blues (1961). In 1964, the major studio feature film Fail-Safe was released with him openly credited for the screenplay writer.

In 1977 he was nominated for the Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay and the WGA Award for Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen for the motion picture The Front (1976), about a man (played by Woody Allen) who acts as a front for blacklisted screenwriters. He also makes a cameo appearance as an actor in Allen's film Annie Hall that same year.

The following year he was nominated for the WGA for Best Comedy Adapted from Another Medium for Semi-Tough and again in 1979 he was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Screenplay for Yanks. Amongst Bernstein's other popular works is the highly successful 1960 film, The Magnificent Seven for which he was not credited at the time. Bernstein also has The Molly Maguires (1970) to his credit.

It was in 1980 that the film he directed, Little Miss Marker, was released. Later, in recognition of his contribution to the film and television industry, the Writers Guild of America East honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 1996, Bernstein published a book about the blacklisting period titled Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist. In his memoirs, he tells about joining the Young Communist League while he was at Dartmouth College in 1937.

Allegations of KGB link

Signals intelligence intercepts released after the fall of the Soviet Union, obtained as part of the super-secret Venona project, imply that Bernstein had a relationship with the KGB.

In October 1944 a secret KGB document contained the following sentence: "Khan met Bernstein who welcomed the re-establishment of liaison with him and promised to write a report on his trip." This document has caused some people to believe him to be an asset of the KGB.

In Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr claimed that the Venona project transcripts establish that Bernstein was a Soviet source. However this conclusion is disputed. In an article in The Nation, Walter and Miriam Schneir write 'The authors' avidity for names is also demonstrated by their inclusion of the screenwriter Walter Bernstein here. Bernstein is mentioned by his real name in a single Venona message from 1944, which states that he has "promised to write a report on his trip." The Schneir article described the trip as "a daring journalistic foray into German-occupied Yugoslavia to interview Tito for Yank magazine. Though Bernstein has declared that he never wrote any report for Soviet intelligence, he, too, is listed as someone who had a "covert relationship" with the KGB".

"Khan" remains unidentified by NSA and FBI counterintelligence analysts, but is thought to be Avram Landy, a senior Communist Party official.

References

• National Security Agency Archives
• Walter Bernstein, Inside Out: A Memoir of the Blacklist (New York: Knopf, 1996) ISBN 0-306-80936-2
• Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pgs. 238–240, 343, 430. ISBN 0-300-07771-8
• Blacklist

External links

• Walter Bernstein at IMDb
• Archive of American Television interview with Walter Bernstein