The Hollywood Left and the Blacklist: A Chat With the Curator of Locarno’s Timely Retrospective for the Age of Trump & Co.

Dalton Trumbo (left) and John Howard Lawson campaigning before being sent to prison in 1950

This interview with me was conducted by Georg Szalai for The Hollywood Reporter. You can read Georg's intro here. — EK

Georg Szalai: Have you been working on this retrospective for Locarno for a long time, and how easy was the decision that the time was ripe for it?

Ehsan Khoshbakht: I had this project lined up for later because it needed more research, but suddenly it felt senseless to delay it any further—it’s about what’s happening right now. Even some of the terminology has come back into use. Just look at recent press releases from the White House. You’ll find phrases that sound like they come straight out of the McCarthyism playbook: “Radical Left Lunatics,” “subversive un-American,” and so on.

What’s especially interesting is that the Left, the Right, and even the center have all appropriated the language of that era for their own purposes. There’s a mix here of genuine confusion—often rooted in a limited understanding of the historical context—and a more deliberate effort to repurpose language for one’s own ends.

A Viewer's Guide to the Locarno Film Festival's Hollywood Left and the Blacklist Retrospective

Body and Soul

Brief notes on all the titles to be screened in Locarno as part of the Red & Black retrospective. — EK

Debris, Heartbreak, Unhealed Wounds: The Legacy of the Hollywood Blacklist

The Hollywood 19

 

These questions were sent to me by email by the Italian critic Maurizio Porro. If I have understood correctly, he used parts of my responses in his Corriere della Sera article on the forthcoming Hollywood Blacklist retrospective that I have curated for the Locarno Film Festival. — EK

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Are there obvious points of contact between the titles?

They’re all connected like the branches of a tree. Some of those branches are revealed to be connected by this programme for the first time.

The most immediate connection is the central narrative, which traces the cinema of the radical and the left in Hollywood from the US entry into the Second World War and its alliance with the USSR through to the formation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings for Hollywood, the blacklist that ensued, and eventually the gradual demise of this system of arbitrarily banning talent from working in the film and television industries.

These films are also connected by individuals—either in front of or behind the camera—who were targeted by the witch hunt. If you ask me why an Argentine film by a French director, such as Native Son, is in the programme, I would answer that the writer of the novel on which the film was based—the great Richard Wright—was also targeted during the McCarthy era. Unable to make the film in the US, it was produced in Argentina. Nobody dared to play the leading role, so Wright himself appeared in it. The programme therefore offers an expansive notion of the blacklist that even includes the jazz bandleader and clarinetist Artie Shaw. We will also screen one of his short films.

Red & Black (2026) | New book on Hollywood blacklist

 

Red and Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist

Edited by Ehsan Khoshbakht

Published by Les éditions de l'oeil

Out in late July 2026 | Pre-order here (Shipped from August)

In the period now known as the McCarthy era, a climate of fear bordering on paranoia took root. Communists, it was claimed, had infiltrated Hollywood for its profits and its immense global propaganda power. They had to be purged. A series of governmental “hearings” followed, deliberately designed as, and functioning like trials. Hundreds suspected of being leftist “subversives” or “un-American” were effectively barred from employment in the film and television industries.

Red and Black, featuring a dozen new essays – several by leading scholars in the field – revisits the work of the Hollywood Left and the blacklist that haunted American cinema from 1947 well into the 1960s. It traces the careers of the blacklistees – from radical communists to committed liberals – before and during the witch-hunt, following them through years of anonymous work behind pseudonyms and, for some, exile.

The book presents a group portrait of figures such as Charles Chaplin, Dalton Trumbo, Joseph Losey, Adrian Scott, Paul Jarrico, John Berry, Hugo Butler, Cy Endfield, Bernard Vorhaus, and Irving Lerner at a moment when their civil liberties were under attack by the very institutions meant to protect them.

Full Line-up: Hollywood Blacklist Retrospective at Locarno

 

I have already shared news about Red and Black, a forthcoming programme on the Hollywood Left/leftism and the blacklist/McCarthyism, which will take place at the Locarno Film Festival from 5–15 August. (Previous posts included the accompanying podcast series, which you can still access here.)

Now I am delighted to share the complete programme.

The retrospective features 26 films that will be screened in 35mm (including several photochemical restorations), one 16mm print, and the remainder in excellent DCP presentations. In total, fifty or fifty one titles.

Highlights include very rare films by Losey, Vorhaus and Odets; brand-new restorations of A King in New York and The Hat; newly scanned, rarely seen period newsreels; and the world premieres of two documentaries: Dangerous Citizen: The Life and Times of Abraham Polonsky and La Liste Noire d’Hollywood: Par ceux qui l’ont vécue, about a remarkable 1983 gathering in Los Angeles attended by many of the last surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist.

"Red & Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist" Trailer

This project encompasses my curatorial work, including a retrospective of more than 50 films at Locarno, a book published in Paris, and a podcast recorded in London, all three on Hollywood radicals and the ensuing blacklist.

Red & Black: The Hollywood Blacklist Podcast

 

This six-part series on the Hollywood Left and the Blacklist is my first foray into the world of podcasting.

Written and produced for the Locarno Film Festival – where I have also curated a major retrospective on the same subject for the forthcoming 2026 edition – the series is narrated by Eve P. Thompson and sound-edited by Rob Szeliga.

The episodes are:

1. The Left on the Rise

2. From Hot War to Cold War: Years of Anxiety

3. The Cinema of the Left and the Radical

4. HUAC Attacks!

5. Blacklisted and Rejected: Fronts and Exiles

6. The New Left and Coming Out of Darkness

Into the Red River: Adolphe Menjou Turns on John Cromwell

John Cromwell's Caged (1950) will play as part of Red & Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist at 79th Locarno Film Festival, August 2026. — EK

Hearings regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry

Tuesday, October 21, 1947

House of Representatives, Committee on Un-American Activities, Washington D.C.

Humphrey Bogart: "I'm No Communist!"

Transcribed from Photoplay, March 1948, Vol. 32, No. 4. A segment of this I have used in my upcoming, six-episode podcast about Hollywood Blacklist, to be released in June 2026. — EK

As the guy said to the warden, just before he was hanged: “This will teach me a lesson I’ll never forget.”

No, sir, I'll never forget the lesson that was taught to me in the year 1947, at Washington, D. C. When I got back to Hollywood, some friends sent me a mounted fish and underneath it was written: "If I hadn't opened my big mouth, I wouldn't be here."

The New York Times, the Herald Tribune and other reputable publications editorially had questioned the House Committee on Un-American Activities, warning that it was infringing on free speech. When a group of us Hollywood actors and actresses said the same thing, the roof fell in on us. In some fashion, I took the brunt of the attack. Suddenly, the plane that had flown us East became "Bogart's plane," carrying "Bogart's group." For once, top billing became embarrassing.

Red and Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist

Red and Black: Hollywood Left and the Blacklist is the title and the theme of the upcoming retrospective I have curated for the 79th edition of Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland.

The retrospective presents not only the key titles of the blacklist period but also traces the wartime origins of concern over communist infiltration in Hollywood and its international aftermath. The programme features nearly 50 titles, including feature films, shorts, documentaries, newsreels, and animation.

This retrospective differs from previous surveys of the same subject in three ways:

The Brave Bulls (Robert Rossen, 1951)

The new 4K restoration of the film – courtesy of Sony/Columbia – plays on November 8 at Harvard Film Archive as part of the retrospective co-curated by Haden Guest and me, Columbia 101: The Rarities. — EK

The Brave Bulls was Robert Rossen’s final film in a cycle of four complex explorations of corruption and fear (Johnny O'clock, The Undercover Man, All the King's Men) that he either directed or wrote for Columbia. A brutally frank bullfighting drama, the film follows a matador (Mel Ferrer) who, beginning to crack under the pressure of his profession and a newfound fear of the ring, seeks to reclaim control over his life. Anthony Quinn plays a typically Rossenian character—a charismatic manipulator who, like Broderick Crawford in All the King’s Men, holds the power to both redeem and destroy.