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FILM CRITICISM, THE COLD WAR, AND THE BLACKLIST: Reading the Hollywood Reds. By Jeff Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2014. HOLLYWOOD EXILES IN EUROPE: The Blacklist and Cold War Culture. By Rebecca Prime. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2014.
Hollywood Exiles merits a special place in the literature of the blacklist, spawned by the 1947 House Un-American Activities Committee's investigation into the socalled communist subversion of the movie industry. While other studies have focused on the publicity-seeking committee-whose chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, was later convicted of embezzlement-the First Amendment stand of the Hollywood Ten, the testimonies of the friendly and unfriendly witnesses, and the careers that were derailed or destroyed, Prime concentrates on the screenwriters and directors who preferred expatriation to remaining in an America where a subpoena would bring them before a tribunal that would demand an answer to the question, "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?" Refusing to answer could result in a charge of contempt of Congress; taking the Fifth would make one unemployable.
The European exiles were a mixed group-e.g., directors (Jules Dassin, John Berry, Joseph Losey) and writers (Michael Wilson, Paul Jarrico, Cy Endfield, Carl Foreman) who chose to work abroad, mostly in London and Paris. The author has woven a compelling narrative, starting with the émigrés' arrival in an alien environment and concluding with the end of the blacklist that left some with better résumés than they would have had in Hollywood; and...