Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten

The story of the Hollywood Tenscreenwriters, directors and one producer who went to prison for defying the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947has been told before in memoirs, histories and movies. Dick, author of The Star-Spangled Screen , takes a different tack; his 10 chapters closely analyze the writing career of each dissenter. Scriptwriter John Howard Lawson channeled his Marxist sympathies into fashioning star vehicles for James Cagney, that populist rebel against society. Ring Lardner Jr. was vilified by the media as an ingrate who forsook a country that bestowed fame on his humorist father; later he won an Oscar for the script of M*A*S*H. Novelist Dalton Trumbo ( Johnny Got His Gun ) survived prison to break the blacklist; in 1956 he embarrassed Hollywood's elite by winning an Oscar for The Brave One under a pseudonym. Yet most of the Ten found their creativity stymied, their career options limited by their notoriety. This insightful critical study lifts a veil off a period of blacklisting paranoia that lingered on until the mid-1960s. (Dec.)