Brève description / annotation

Published to coincide with the Retrospective of the 79th Locarno Film Festival (2026) 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. Featuring 140 stills from the collection of the BFI National Archive.

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