Albert Maltz may be known for three main reasons. He was a novelist and short story writer, a screenwriter, and a member of the Hollywood Ten, the group of (mostly) writers who were imprisoned and blacklisted because, as members of the American Communist Party, they refused to co-operate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during its 1947 investigations into alleged communist infiltration of the film industry. It’s my intention in this article to focus on Maltz’s links to the Communist Party, and especially to an event during his Hollywood years which, I think, still has relevance today. However, some basic facts about his life are needed to provide a background to what came later.

Maltz was born in 1908 into an affluent Jewish family in Brooklyn. He attended Columbia University, and then enrolled at the Yale School of Drama. It was the theatre that initially seems to have interested Maltz and, together with co-writer George Sklar, he enjoyed some success with a play called Merry Go Round, which opened in April 1932 at the Provincetown Playhouse, and then moved to Broadway. It perhaps gave an indication of the way Maltz was thinking in that it touched on corruption in local government, something that didn’t make it popular with officials in New York. Another Maltz play from this period, also written with Sklar, was Peace on Earth, its sentiments implicit in its title, while a third, Black Pit, was the result of a trip that Maltz made through coalmining areas in Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

Maltz joined the Communist Party in 1935. Stories by him appeared in the communist publication, New Masses, and were also being published in more conventional magazines, such as Story and the New Yorker. And his novel, The Underground Stream, was published in 1940. His reputation was rising, and in 1941 he moved to the West Coast and employment as a screenwriter in Hollywood. His first credit came in 1942 when, teamed with W.R. Burnett, he wrote the screenplay for This Gun For Hire, which starred Alan Ladd. It was around the same time that he wrote the commentary for a short film, Moscow Strikes Back. By 1942 both America and Russia were embroiled in the Second World War, and it was acceptable to see the two countries as allies and look positively on Stalin and Russia.

Maltz appears to have been among the first choices when it came to writing wartime films that were morale-boosters. He produced screenplays for Destination Tokyo (1943), Pride of the Marines (1945), and the postwar, Cloak and Dagger (1946), with Ring Lardner Jnr as his writing partner for the latter. Lardner was later to join Maltz as one of the Hollywood Ten. Maltz’s novel, The Cross and the Arrow, an anti-fascist tale of the resistance movement in Germany, was published in 1944.  It was a commercial success, and was also printed in an Armed Services edition, with 150,000 copies circulated to personnel in the armed forces. A further example of Maltz’s commitment to liberal and left-wing causes was apparent in his script for a short film, The House I Live in, which featured Frank Sinatra talking to a group of children about the evils of prejudice resulting from differences in race, religion, and other factors. Maltz was given an Academy Award for his work on this film.

If Maltz’s career was at its peak in 1946 it was soon to almost come to an end in 1947 when HUAC arrived in Hollywood. What happened has been extensively written about in books and articles. Maltz and his companions were all found guilty of contempt, for refusing to co-operate with the Committee, and though the appeals procedures dragged out their sentencing they all eventually went to prison. In the intervening period Maltz had worked with Marvin Wald on the film noir, The Naked City, and had written a screenplay for Broken Arrow (1950) and worked on one for The Robe (1950), though neither film credited him as the screenwriter until many years later. Michael Blankfort had acted as the “front” for Maltz on Broken Arrow and Philip Dunne’s name appeared on screen for The Robe. Dunne made no mention of Maltz’s involvement in his autobiography, Take Two : A Life in Movies and Politics, though he was possibly unaware of it when he was asked to take over the screenplay for The Robe. As for Maltz, he wasn’t employed in films again until 1970 when he wrote the screenplay for Two Mules for Sister Sara, a Western directed by Don Siegel. Earlier, Frank Sinatra had wanted to hire Maltz as the writer for The Execution of Private Slovik, but was forced to back down when right wing elements campaigned against using him.

I mentioned at the beginning of this survey an “event” that affected Maltz’s activities in Hollywood, and his status as a member of the Communist Party. In 1946 Maltz wrote an article, “What Shall We Ask of Writers?”, published in New Masses, in which he put forward the notion that writers should not be required to follow a “party line” regarding subject-matter and how it is handled. And that the idea of “Art as a Weapon” had exercised a limiting, and possibly even damaging effect on writers: “I have come to believe that the accepted understanding of art as a weapon is not a useful guide, but a straitjacket. I have felt this in my own works and viewed it in the works of others. In order to write at all, it has long since become necessary for me to repudiate it and abandon it”.   

The extract above is just a small part of a fairly lengthy, well-written argument around his belief that writers needed to be free to develop their ideas, and that books should not be judged on the basis of where their authors stood politically. He referred to Engels who admired Balzac and thought that the French novelist had “taught him more about the social structure of France than all the economists, sociologists, etc., of the period”. And yet, Balzac was “a Royalist, consistently and virulently anti-democratic, anti-Socialist, anti-Communist in his thinking as a citizen”. Maltz mentioned other writers whose politics might not match those of the communists, but who, he thought, had more to offer than most of those adhering to a Party-approved programme of political correctness. One of them was James T. Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy and many additional novels and short stories.

If the general outline of Maltz’s article attracted general anger and concern among communists, it may have been the specific focus on Farrell which aroused some particular ire. He had been associated with the Communist Party in the early-1930s, but had broken away and allied himself with the Trotskyists. That, to most communists, was tantamount to an act of betrayal, and any indication of favourable references to the man or his books was frowned on.

It's now difficult to understand the strength of feeling aroused by Maltz’s article. Reading it today it seems reasonable and even moderate in its call for greater freedom for writers who were communists. But in 1946 the Party hierarchy in New York was sufficiently concerned to dispatch a delegation to Hollywood and convene what was, in effect, a disciplinary meeting to examine the case against Maltz. Included in the delegation were the novelist Howard Fast, the Daily Worker columnist Samuel Sillen, and cultural columnist V.J. Jerome. Also along for the ride were Wiliam Z. Foster, the Party leader in America and a known hardliner, together with Mike Gold, a well-known communist writer who described Farrell as “a vicious, voluble Trotskyite”, and placed him alongside “similar rats” like Max Eastman and Eugene Lyons who didn’t look kindly on the Communist Party.

The meeting was held in Party-member Abraham Polonsky’s house, with many local Party members in attendance, and judging from accounts by people who were present it was obvious from the start that Maltz was going to be pilloried. When he tried to explain his reasons for writing the article “a chorus of howls stopped him short and he clammed up. When one or two of the others tried to speak in Maltz’s favour, the Party squad shouted them down. There was no question of debate. Rather, Maltz and his defenders were not to be heard. Arnold Manoff, one of the first to congratulate Matz on his article, said nothing. ’The wolves were loose and you should have seen them’, said Leonard Atlas, ‘It was a spectacle for all time’ “.

I’ve taken the above account from Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley’s Hollywood Party, and he says, “Maltz’s associates of long-standing, his friends and comrades joined in the kill with the greatest zeal. In their circles, Maltz had been known as a person of talent and integrity. Now none of this counted for anything. ‘They worked him over with every verbal fang and claw at their command’, said Atlas, ‘every axe and bludgeon, and they had plenty. They evidently were past masters of this sort of intellectual cannibalism’ “. When a second meeting was held, Atlas recalled, “they completely broke him…..the hyena attack – that is the only way I can describe it – continued with a rising snarl of triumph, and made him crawl and recant.”

The recantation came in the form of an article, “Moving Forward”, that Maltz published in the Daily Worker in April 1946. In it he said: “I consider now that my article  - by what I have come to agree was a one-sided non-dialectical treatment of complex issues – could not, as I had hoped, contribute to the development of left-wing criticism and creative writing. I believe also that my critics were entirely correct in insisting that certain fundamental ideas in my article would, if pursued to their conclusion, result in the dissolution of the left-wing cultural movement”.  There was more of the same abject apologising in what Maltz wrote, including a reference to a “revisionist process” which was “the result of a failure to deeply break with old habits of thought”. Maltz came up with a new opinion of James T. Farrell who now was an example of how “a poisoned ideology and increasingly sick soul can sap the talent and wreck the living fiber of a man’s work”. Farrell’s writing, Maltz averred, had declined since he became a Trotskyist.

It was all horribly reminiscent of the kind of confessions drawn from defendants in the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s, though Maltz wasn’t likely to be punished by being executed or sent to the Gulag. He just had to humiliate himself in front of fellow-members of the Communist Party. Why he chose to do so, instead of being defiant and quitting the Party, is open to question. Leonard Atlas, commenting on his own situation, thought that if he handed in his Party card his career in Hollywood could be affected as communists were in positions of influence in the film industry. He did eventually leave and testified at a HUAC hearing.  In Maltz’s case, however, it may have been that he sincerely believed in communism as a cause worth supporting, and consequently that his acceptance of being wrong was a price he had to pay to demonstrate his loyalty to that cause.

It’s probable that the level of opposition to what Malz had written owed something to what had happened within the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA). In 1944 its then leader, Earl Browder, had dissolved the CPUSA and re-established it as the Communist Political Association (CPA), with a policy of co-operation with other left and liberal organisations. But when the Second World War ended, and attitudes began to change, Browder was ousted and the CPUSA reinstated, with a harder, some would say Stalinist, line in terms of imposing discipline on Party members. Hence the fact of so many Party officials from New York, including the new leader, William Z. Foster, being in attendance at Maltz’s inquisition. There is the suggestion, also, that the Hollywood communists, with their high earnings, were a prime source of funds for the Party. If they were allowed to be too independent they might not have carried on donating on a regular basis.

It may seem that what happened to Maltz in 1946 has little relevance today, but with censorship of various kinds on the increase, together with a tendency for people to be shouted down if they fail to adhere to a specific line in a certain subject, it strikes me that it’s important to know about what happened in the past. The freedom to express an opinion, and have it debated openly and without rancour, is too precious to lose to groups who believe that only their views count and that everything else has to be eliminated from discussion.

NOTES

The impulse to write this piece came from reading Maltz’s novel, The Journey of Simon McKeever, originally published in 1949 and re-issued by Alms Books in 2024.      It’s a well-told story of an old man leaving the retirement home he’s been living in and making his way to Los Angeles in search of a cure for his arthritis. There are some social and political comments in the book, but it’s not didactic. It’s largely a chronicle of his experiences, the people he meets as he alternates between bus rides and hitching lifts, and how they treat him. It can, perhaps, be seen as the sort of book Maltz wanted to write without interference from the Party’s cultural dictators.

It's worth noting that Alma Books have a programme of re-publishing all of Maltz’s novels, with one exception, and a collection of his short stories. The one exception is his first book, The Underground Stream, first published in 1940. It has now been republished in the United States by 1917 Books.

Maltz’s The Citizen Writer : Essays in Defence of American Culture (International Publishers, New York, 1950) is a small book with seven essays by him. They’re worth reading from the point of view of outlining his thoughts on the topics of civil liberties, the Hollywood Ten, the writer as conscience of the people, and other similar subjects.

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley’s Hollywood Party : How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s (Forum, Rocklin, 1998) was useful when writing about Maltz. Likewise, Red Star Over Hollywood : The Film Colony’s Long Romance with the Left by Ronald Radosh and Allis Radosh (Encounter Books, San Francisco, 2005). Billingsley’s book has the advantage of having the texts of Maltz’s two 1946 articles, and Mike Gold’s critical comments from the Daily Worker on the original piece. More of Gold’s responses to Maltz can be found in Mike Gold : A Literary Anthology edited by Michael Folsom (International Publishers, New York, 1972). Jack Salzman’s Albert Maltz (Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1978) has information about Maltz’s novels and other publications, together with additional details and commentary. Philip Dunne’s Take Two : A Life in Movies and Politics (Limelight Editions, New York, 1992) is interesting in relation to Maltz’s involvement in the screenplay for The Robe.

There are a number of books about the American Communist Party, and I used The AmerIcan Communist Party : A Critical History by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser (Da Capo Press, New York, 1974) as my guide. It refers to the Maltz affair. Both Howe and Coser were active in left/liberal circles and would have observed at first hand the ins and outs of communist policies in the 1940s and 1950s. Their book was originally published in 1957 by Beacon Press.