British reviewers fixated on Endfield’s Hollywood touch, praising (or occasionally chiding) the film for its American-style red-blooded action. Few seemed to notice that this visceral thrill ride was loaded with radical messages about how profit-driven systems use competition and illusory rewards to blind their victims. This was just the kind of film that the red-baiters in Congress and Hollywood had tried to stamp out. It still hits hard today, but Endfield was disappointed that the Rank Organization, in addition to cutting some of his favorite scenes (due at least in part to censorship), did not effectively push the film’s release in the United States. He was increasingly frustrated with his career prospects, and bitter about seeing good projects slip through his fingers while the film industry clandestinely—and hypocritically, he felt—employed blacklisted writers working under fronts. In 1958, he contacted HUAC, asserting his rejection of Communism and pleading for a chance to clear himself without naming names, an act for which he still felt “emotional repugnance.” The committee refused.
His experience spotlights one of the most poisonous aspects of the HUAC hearings and the blacklist. It was not enough to declare oneself anti-Communist; the only way to obtain a clean bill of health was to rat on your colleagues, performing a ritualistic act of informing as a show of submission. Those who refused faced not only blacklisting but FBI surveillance, the confiscation of their passports, and even jail time. Many decided the price was too high. In 1960, Endfield flew to Washington and testified, naming associates, in order to get off the blacklist. He reaped some reward, securing funding and distribution from Paramount for his largest-scale and most acclaimed film, Zulu, but never reestablished himself in Hollywood.
Those who reversed their initial resistance—among them Edward Dmytryk and Robert Rossen—often justified the choice by citing their disenchantment with Communism. Abraham Polonsky had an answer to this. He had likewise become a skeptic about the party yet still defied HUAC; while blacklisted, he wrote the scripts for Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) and numerous episodes of the educational television program You Are There. “To betray your friends is a moral crime,” Polonsky said. “Not to believe in something you believed before is an act of liberation. There is a difference between the two things.” Others warned against passing judgment. Reflecting on those affected by the blacklist, Trumbo insisted: “It will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils, because there were none.”
Film noir is finely and indelibly shaded with moral ambiguity; those who commit monstrous acts, like Howard Tyler, may not be monsters, and those determined to do right, like Tom Yately, may still cause harm. The enforcers of the blacklist relied on crude demonization, painting Communism as a force so evil and dangerous that battling it justified bullying, guilt-by-association, and suppression of free expression. We will never know what films weren’t made because artists were driven from the industry or frightened into silence. But the films we do have by blacklistees are warning flares that have lost none of their urgency, to their credit and to our shame.