Walter Bernstein, 1919-2021

Zero Mostel in The Front (Bernstein and Ritt, 1976) 

I nev­er met Walter Bernstein, the legendary screen­writer who died last night at the age of 101 —and while his passing is of course an occa­sion for mourn­ing, good for him to reach­ing that age — but at times, with mutu­al friends, I could sense his pres­ence. Those people I knew who did know Bernstein, and brought him up in con­ver­sa­tion, car­ried his wis­dom and humor with them, it seemed. It made me glad he was still around.

He was cred­ited on a lot of films and not cred­ited on a lot of films, and put­ting them all togeth­er you see a lot of clas­sics, some reli­able genre pic­tures, and some wild cards. That’s almost invari­ably how it is, or how it was, for a gig­ging screen­writer in Hollywood, par­tic­u­larly in the post-World-War-II days. It’s prob­ably no coin­cid­ence, though, that some of his best-known films were made with two dir­ect­ors with whom he had def­in­ite affin­it­ies of back­ground and upbring­ing. There’s Fail-Safe, adap­ted from Eugene Burdick’s nov­el, dir­ec­ted by Sidney Lumet, anoth­er New Yorker, Jewish, tough-minded, crafts­man, left-leaning, on the bois­ter­ous side at times. Fail-Safe was one of his — their — most po-faced films, but if you were alive in the time it was made you may remem­ber it had reas­on to be. Sometimes as a kid I’d catch the last half-hour on tele­vi­sion — Henry Fonda’s mono­logue, the descrip­tion of the shriek of the melt­ing phone, the freeze-frames of New York City that end the film — and I’d have night­mares the whole rest of the week. Bernstein had worked with Lumet sev­er­al years before, on 1959’s That Kind of Woman, which had a pro­voc­at­ive sub-theme of the kept woman, and seems to have been a Paramount attempt to beef up lead­ing man Tab Hunter’s dra­mat­ic cred. It didn’t quite work, but it’s, as they say, interesting.

The oth­er dir­ect­or was Martin Ritt, with whom Bernstein worked on three pic­tures, all of them worth revis­it­ing. 1961’s Paris Blues, from Harold Flender’s nov­el, about American expat jazz musi­cians in the title burg, was meant to have the prot­ag­on­ists each engage in inter­ra­cial romance with American tour­ists. As cost­ar Sidney Poitier recoun­ted, United Artists “chickened out” and so Paul Newman woos Joanne Woodward and Poitier gets involved with Diahann Caroll. For all that, and the fact that the movie is still some­times dis­missed as a trifle, Paris Blues has some meat on its bones. Particularly in the scenes in which Poitier’s char­ac­ter explains to Carroll’s why he doesn’t ever want to go back to America. (I should note here that Bernstein is one of four cred­ited writers on the pic­ture; the oth­ers are Irene Kamp, Jack Sher, and Lulia Rosenfeld.) One is reminded of Miles Davis’ sub­sequent auto­bi­o­graphy, in which he speaks of his joy (it’s one of the few purely joy­ous parts of the book) of being able to walk with and hold hands and kiss Juliette Greco out in the open while liv­ing in the City of Lights. Paris Blues also gets the music, which few Hollywood pic­tures of the time did. Newman’s char­ac­ter, and his music­al ambi­tion, likely informed Scorsese and De Niro’s con­cep­tion of Jimmy Doyle in New York, New York.

The Molly Maguires, from 1970, is one of the most uncom­prom­ised politically-themed pic­tures to come out of Hollywood, and proof that you can (could) make an undi­luted state­ment with­in that con­text. Bernstein, a crackerjack research­er, based his story around late 19^th cen­tury labor agit­a­tion in the mines of Pennsylvania — most of whose work­ers were Irish immig­rants. The open­ing scene is one of the great fake-outs in movies; what you take to be mine work is actu­ally mine sab­ot­age. A full 27 years before There Will Be Blood, it’s fif­teen minutes before the first word of dia­logue is spoken. The rela­tion­ship between Sean Connery’s ringlead­er and Richard Harris’s under­cov­er invest­ig­at­or is a lot more full-blooded, real­ist­ic, and gal­van­iz­ing than the capital-labor car­toons Bertolucci would sketch with De Niro and Depardieu in 1900 sev­en years later.

Then there’s 1976’s The Front, a beau­ti­fully dis­tilled piece of dra­mat­ic writ­ing filmed with res­ol­ute dis­patch and pas­sion by Ritt. It’s the story of Bernstein’s life, or a sig­ni­fic­ant por­tion of it, as told through someone else’s life. Woody Allen, using his nebbish per­sona in a more heim­ishe fash­ion than he had before or has since, plays Howard Prince, a reg­u­lar guy who just hap­pens to know a tele­vi­sion writer who’s out of work because what we still call “the black­list.” He finds money, a bit of fame, and ulti­mately, his con­science and his voice, work­ing as a “front” for his friend, and then oth­er writers. It’s a par­able that’s also a bit of his­tory, and its humor draws on a razor-sharp irony without being wholly depend­ent on it — it’s also a ter­ribly tender movie. And Zero Mostel, a black­list vic­tim in real life, is heart­break­ing as a doubly-washed-up per­former who befriends Howard.

I ima­gine Bernstein must have been grat­i­fied, at the end of his script, to have Howard say to a HUAC pan­el some­thing Bernstein him­self was not able to say: “Go fuck yourselves.” I leave this for last because I wanted to lead off with some­thing oth­er than “black­lis­ted screen­writer,” because Bernstein was a whole lot more than that. But he was also that, and his 1996 book about that peri­od, Inside Out, A Memoir of the Blacklist, proved that he was not only a great writer of drama but a ter­rif­ic prose scribe. The two aren’t always mutu­ally exclus­ive. The book is an imme­di­ate grab­ber. Not even twenty pages in, and Bernstein’s giv­en you fas­cin­at­ing thumb­nail sketches of Ben Hecht, Robert Rossen, Robert Parrish and James Dean, and fuller por­traits of Ritt and Elia Kazan. Here’s a para­graph from the early part of the book: “The cold war was start­ing, and with it the black­list, but it was not affect­ing me and, secure in wish ful­fill­ment, I did not really believe it would. Winston Churchill had made his Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri. The Hollywood Ten were summoned before the House com­mit­tee, but the com­mit­tee mem­bers seemed only stu­pid; I under­stood their bigotry but not their power. Who, really, could be on their side? I also knew the Communist Party was no men­ace. After all, I belonged to it. The charge that we wanted to over­throw the gov­ern­ment by force and viol­ence was ludicrous. Nothing I had ever done or inten­ded or even thought was designed for that. No one I knew in the Party even dreamed of it. Our meet­ings might have been less bor­ing if they had. I took for gran­ted that I could be both.” And the rest is just as good.

My friends who are also friends of Walter are Jay Cocks and Howard Rodman, Jr., two screen­writers who belong, with Bernstein, in the club of won­der­ful prose writers. (Check out Howard’s vis­ion­ary nov­el The Great Eastern, and Jay’s mov­ing and evoc­at­ive trib­ute to Huey “Piano” Smith in the Greil Marcus antho­logy Stranded.) Whenever either man spoke of Walter in my pres­ence, their eyes lit up in a par­tic­u­lar way. I also had the hon­or, in 2019, of shar­ing a meal — at Harry’s Bar in Venice, yet — with Walter’s son Jake, an invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ist whose pas­sion for social justice and socially per­tin­ent writ­ing were no doubt inspired by his father’s example. His book Secrecy World, about the Panama Papers and the vari­ous tendrils eman­at­ing from it, inspired Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat. I extend my con­dol­ences to them all, and to all who were touched by Walter and his work. And I wish I’d have met him; I’d have asked him about the movies I cite above, and also about Semi-Tough, the hil­ari­ous foot­ball pic­ture he wrote for Michael Ritchie. And, had I got­ten com­fort­able enough, I might have quer­ied: “So. The Betsy. What was up with that?”