Screenwriter Walter Bernstein, among the last survivors of Hollywood’s anti-Communist blacklist whose Oscar-nominated script for The Front drew upon his years of being unable to work under his own name, died on Saturday. He was 101.
The cause was pneumonia, according to his wife, the literary agent Gloria Loomis.
A World War II correspondent for the military who also had been published in The New Yorker, Walter Bernstein was at the start of what seemed a promising film career when the Cold War and anti-Communist paranoia led to his being blacklisted in 1950, a fate which ruined the lives of many of his peers and led some to suicide. Job offers to Bernstein were rescinded and onetime friends stopped speaking to him. FBI agents looked through his trash, showed up at his door and followed him outside.