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?”

Comments

[Thomas]

Very beautiful. Thank you,

[Christian Lanier]

PARIS BLUES is maybe slight and kinda corny, but it’s also got enough cool for two movies to coast on, between Newman and Poitier and Ellington (the one thing I really wish - that when Newman had the big shot producer review his composition, the producer should’ve called the piece promising, but too derivative of the Duke). Woodward is legit wonderful in it, the musical scene with Armstrong is entertaining as hell - and the movie as a whole really gets the camaraderie of a musician’s scene, where the playing bridges the stage and the parties, part vocation and part socialization - woven into the fabric of work and life, blurring the boundaries between them. I think Ritt is an underappreciated American director, and it’s nice to get a sense of how his sensibilities dovetailed with Bernstein’s.

[George]

“So. The Betsy. What was up with that?”

Probably a big paycheck.

[Griff]

THE BETSY was likely just a paycheck for Bernstein, but at the time he signed on to write the movie, the producers were dreaming of a tony, high profile picture which would enhance and transform the Harold Robbins potboiler into something like THE GODFATHER. [The Bernstein script was apparently instrumental in helping to secure Laurence Olivier and others to star in the film.] Ultimately the producers decided that Bernstein's script was probably too high-toned for their purposes, and brought in William Bast to do a substantial rewrite.