To borrow a phrase from Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the most joyous sequence in the history of classic Hollywood film is Gene Kelly's dance routine for the title number of MGM's 1952 musical, Singin' in the Rain. It's a love song, of course (when you're in love, you don't bother that it's raining); and it's a song about triumph over adversity (even though it's raining, I'm still singing). Yet this most euphoric of musical numbers has one peculiar feature- it ends quietly, not with the expected big climax but on an apologetic diminuendo. Kelly's glorious display is cut short, and it's the ending of this extract that particularly intrigues me:

EXTRACT

Isn't that ending strange- the way Kelly's exuberance is suddenly brought down to earth, contained, momentarily silenced by the presence of this authority figure, the cop? Let me suggest to you that that figure symbolises Senator McCarthy, or at least the fear engendered by McCarthyism- that atmosphere of witch-hunt that was sweeping Hollywood like a forest fire in 1952. The figure's presence is enough to stop Kelly in mid-step, and indeed, for someone at that time in Kelly's shoes (a celebrity whose social and political consciousness was forged during the Depression and the New Deal era of Roosevelt, who was a self-confessed social democrat, liberal in political outlook, pro-union, anti-racist), the presence of authority and the law coming up menacingly behind you, and staring wonderingly and accusingly at you, could well have given him pause. Nothing is said but the implied question is: 'What are up to? I've got my eye on you.' And Kelly feels sufficiently intimidated to proffer a conciliating explanation: 'I'm dancin' and singin' in the rain…' (i.e. I'm not doing any harm.) But when he moves away from the cop, he moves the way Charlie Chaplin used to move away from policemen- an ingratiating walk that seems imperceptibly to accelerate into a brisk trot- and that movement alone is enough to remind you that this is the year also when Chaplin, in England for the premiere of Limelight ,is informed that he will not be let back into America (where he has lived for 40 years) unless he submits himself to humiliating interrogation from the Immigration office, and he chooses exile: Chaplin's brand of Socialism has finally proved too much for a McCarthyist America to stomach. I love the end of that sequence where Kelly, with the most gracious gesture and in defiance of the policeman, hands his umbrella to a passer-by- because the other person seems to need it, and because Kelly's instinct is to help his fellow man. 'Share and share alike,' he might be saying, 'that's the democratic way.' But when a line similar to that attitude- 'Share and share alike- that's democracy'- penned by Dalton Trumbo- had popped up in the film Tender Comrade, the film's star, the arch-conservative Ginger Rogers had vehemently protested. 'Share and share alike? That's not democracy, that's Communism.' She suspected the very title Tender Comrade had Communist overtones even after it had been explained to her that it was actually quoting a term of endearment from Robert Louis Stevenson about his wife.

I want to talk about a particular event that took place against this background, between the period of panic induced in the late 1940s when the House of UnAmerican Activities Committee began their investigations into Hollywood, and the paranoia that gripped the industry in the early 1950s when McCarthyism took hold. The event is a meeting of the Screen Directors Guild that was held in Hollywood in the Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel on October 22nd, 1950. The meeting lasted 7 ½ hours; and to this day remains the best attended meeting in the Guild's history. I've been fortunate enough to interview two of the people who were there and on whom the evening had an enormous impact: Fred Zinnemann (director of High Noon, From Here to Eternity etc.), who described it to me as 'an evening when people really had to stick their necks out for what they believed in'; and Joseph L.Mankiewicz (writer-director of All About Eve, Letter to Three Wives etc.), perhaps the event's chief protagonist, who told me 'it was the most dramatic evening of my life'- as it would be, for his career and future were on the line.

Ostensibly, the meeting was about the resistance of a section to an attempt by the Guild's board of directors, led by Cecil B.DeMille, to oust Mankiewicz as the Guild's President. More deeply, however, it was an attempt by DeMille and his so-called 'lieutenants' to rid the Guild of any Communist (which, in DeMille-speak, really meant 'liberal') elements in their midst. Even more fundamentally, some would argue, it was a meeting also fundamentally concerned with the American constitution, free speech and democracy. So when the writer-director Walter Reisch was later to describe the meeting as 'the most tumultuous evening in the history of Hollywood', I don't think he was overstating the case.

In a moment, I want to talk about the meeting itself but perhaps I ought to say a little bit more about the context. We're talking about Hollywood's 'nervous years' (as Penelope Houston described them), a post-war era where audiences were beginning to decline, where television was on the horizon as a distant threat to the movies' monopoly of mass entertainment, and where anti-Trust laws were breaking up the monopolistic links between the big motion picture companies and their chain of cinemas. But undoubtedly the thing that was making them most nervous was the investigation by HUAC, begun in 1947, of Communist infiltration of the film industry. The years immediately after the war had seen an era of great social problem films: William Wyler had dealt with the problems of post-war readjustment in The Best Years of our Lives in 1946; Edward Dmytryck in Crossfire and Elia Kazan in Gentleman's Agreement in 1947 had tackled the theme of anti-Semitism; Robert Rossen in All the King's Men in 1949 had exposed political demagoguery and corruption. These were great Oscar-winning pictures, but could they also be construed as anti-American? In the Spring of 1947, the HUAC had interviewed several so-called 'friendly witnesses' in Hollywood- people like Walt Disney, Ronald Reagan, Robert Taylor, Adolphe Menjou, Gary Cooper- who had dedicated themselves to the fight against Communism. Later that year, the official hearings on Hollywood had begun. 39 witnesses were called, including 'ten prominent figures in Hollywood whom the Committee had evidence were members of the Communist Party.' These were to become known as the Hollywood Ten: the writers John Howard Lawson, Dalton Trumbo, Lester Cole, Alvah Bessie, Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner Jr, and Samuel Ornitz; the producer Adrian Scott; and the directors Edward Dmytryck and Herbert J. Biberman (the hero of Karl Francis's film that is showing later tonight).. In essence the witch-hunt had begun.

At the outset many in Hollywood had been resistant to HUAC and its investigations: they thought it was unconstitutional. Under the leadership of William Wyler, John Huston and Philip Dunne, they formed the Committee for the First Amendment, claiming HUAC had no right to enquire into a person's politics, and organised a highly publicised flight to Washington to attend the hearings in support of the people who had been summoned. (There's a famous photo of the people who were on that flight: they included Danny Kaye, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Edward G.Robinson Burt Lancaster, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall etc.) But the event proved a catastrophe for the liberal and left-wing factions in Hollywood. The questioning of the Hollywood Ten developed into an ugly shouting match between their spokesman, the screenwriter, John Howard Lawson and the Committee chairman, Parnell Thomas and ended with the Ten being cited for contempt of court (for refusing to answer the question, 'Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist party?') and sentenced to prison terms. Because of the subsequent legal wrangling, they did not serve their sentences until 1950, by which time they were joined in jail by the chairman of the committee, Parnell Thomas, who had been imprisoned for political fraud and malpractice.

But Hollywood was badly rattled by their experience before HUAC. And the political climate was changing. By 1950, America was becoming involved militarily in Korea, adding to Cold War tensions. It was now the era of the mandatory loyalty oath. The Los Angeles Authorities now required all city and county employees to sign a loyalty oath; the University of California was required to dismiss anyone who refused. It was against this background that the issue of the Screen Directors Guild Meeting blew up.

What happened is an immensely complicated series of events and I can only give the edited highlights here. Basically, Joseph L.Mankiewicz had been elected President of the Screen Directors Guild in 1950. It was known that he was against signing any mandatory loyalty oath- it was meaningless and stupid, he thought. (He wasn't really a political animal: he once told me that he'd never voted for a candidate in any Presidential election, he only voted against people.) However, after the exertions of making All About Eve, Mankiewicz had taken a two-month sabbatical in Europe. While he was away, Cecil B.DeMille, with the Board of Directors, initiated a by-law requiring the membership to sign the loyalty oath. They convened a special emergency meeting of the Board, and then mailed out the forms in an open ballot (so they knew who was for, and who against). 500 said yes, 15 no, and 37 refused to sign. When Mankiewicz returned and learned what had been going on- namely, that the Guild membership had been railroaded by DeMille and his supporters to vote by open ballot to adopt the loyalty oath, which meant, he said, 'that in order to direct a film in America, you had to sign a pledge of patriotism'- he was absolutely aghast. This is illegal, he said: for one thing, it should have been a secret ballot, and, for another, it was only officers of unions or guilds who were required to sign the oath, not the whole membership. It was at this stage that DeMille called a secret meeting of the Board to call for the 'recall', meaning 'dismissal', of Mankiewicz as President of the Guild. Some members of the Board who were known to be in sympathy with Mankiewicz (notably the director George Stevens, about whom more anon) were not told of the meeting until it was too late to attend it. The ballot form simply read, 'This is a ballot to recall Joe Mankiewicz. Tick box marked 'yes'. Sign here'; and the forms were not simply sent out but hand-delivered by motor-cycle messenger. (The form was to be followed by a 4-page telegram critical of Mankiewicz.) They needed 60% of the vote to secure his dismissal. Significantly, when the names of the Guild members were given to the secretaries who were addressing the ballot forms, 55 names (all of them, coincidentally, known or suspected Mankiewicz supporters) had been scratched off the list and the forms delivered. By chance, a form was delivered to the director John Farrow (Mia's dad) whom they thought was on their side but was actually a Mankiewicz supporter, who immediately informed him of what was going on. After consulting a lawyer and according to the rules of the Guild, Mankiewicz secured 25 signatures to petition for an Extraordinary General Meeting to stop the recall motion. Even then, the drama wasn't over. When they went to file the petition at the Guild Office, they found it mysteriously locked, even though it was usually open on Saturdays and even though they could hear people moving inside. Eventually the petition was filed, and George Stevens, with the lawyer Martin Gang, had the opportunity to question the secretarial staff of the Guild about what had been going on, Stevens scrupulously filing away his information in a red loose-leaf binder that was later to become famous. The main drama was to be saved for the night itself.

The meeting began at 7p.m. with a magisterial address by Joe Mankiewicz that took an hour. He gave a detailed chronology of events that had occurred after his return from Europe and a detailed refutation of every allegation made against him by the recall committee. By referring to himself throughout it in the third person, he struck an imperial tone rather in the manner of Julius Caesar (and, as many of you will know, he was to make a brilliant film of Julius Caesar in two years' time). It was a hard act to follow, apparently, and when Cecil B.DeMille came to reply, he struggled to make the same impact, despite the fact that he had organised his own lighting (a baby-pink spotlight on him). He stressed his impartiality in this matter (after all, he didn't really want or need anything from the Guild), then his age, then his patriotism (throwing in an allusion to the casualties in Korea and to the fact that American prisoners had been executed that very morning). That immediately raised the political temperature and what he did next raised it even higher. He queried the political affiliations of the 25 signatories who had supported Mankiewicz and, when he read out their names, he pronounced them in a way that emphasised their foreignness (Fred Zinnemann told me this- that DeMille pronounced the names in a particular way to make it seem like an 'unAmerican' plot: Billy Vilder, William Vyler, Fred Tsinnemann). And at that point things began to get very heated. It was Fritz Lang who said: 'For the first time since I came to this country- [he'd fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s]- the fact that I speak with an accent makes me a little afraid.' The Russian-born Rouben Mamoulian protested against the denial of the very rights that had brought him to America in the first place: 'I chose my citizenship,' he said. William Wyler, born in Alsace-Lorraine but who had lost part of his hearing whilst filming and fighting for the Allies during World War Two, angrily exclaimed, 'I'm fed up of these insinuations and if anyone doubts my loyalty to this country, I'll punch him on the nose,' adding- and he was sitting very close to DeMille at this time- 'and I don't care how old he is.' It was an impassioned debate, with the argument going back and forth, but it was building to two crucial interventions.

The first came from George Stevens, nowadays best known for films he made after that meeting- A Place in the Sun (1951), Shane (1953), Giant (1956)- but prior to the war, most associated with comedies such as Woman of the Year (1941), and The More the Merrier (1943). But Stevens had been part of the American forces that had liberated Dachau concentration camp and he was a changed man after that experience, His sensibilities were now finely tuned to the potential ravages of social and political intolerance. The Mankiewicz faction had deliberately held Stevens back until they could choose the right moment for him to speak with the evidence he had compiled in his famous red folder. Stevens' speech was described to me by Fred Zinnemann as 'wonderful', and Joseph Mankiewicz told me that ' he delivered it like Clarence Darrow- it was absolutely devastating.'

Stevens began with a bombshell. 'I'm offering my resignation from the Guild's Board of Directors,' he said. 'I wasn't a party to this attempt to recall Joe Mankiewicz, but it was done in the Board's name, and I don't want to be associated in any way with its actions, which I regard as not only deplorable but a conspiracy. The recall committee's action was rigged, it was organised… and if there hadn't been a slip-up somewhere, or if the integrity of the membership of this Guild hadn't frustrated that recall, Mr Mankiewicz would have been out… He would just have been smeared and out, quick, overnight, or in 36 hours if you please…'

He then went on to detail-from his red folder- what he had uncovered from his investigation into DeMille's actions, and his cross-examination of the Guild's office staff:
The intimidation of Guild staff to carry out DeMille's instructions
The instruction to them to make themselves unavailable over the critical weekend when the 25 signatories were trying to file their petition, and the closing of the Guild offices when they would normally be open as a further attempt to frustrate those petitioning in favour of Mankiewicz
The confiscation of that incriminating list of Guild members, where 55 names of suspected Mankiewicz supporters had been crossed out as DeMille prepared to serve the ballot papers
The exclusion of known Mankiewicz supporters from meetings of the board by deliberately misinforming them of arrangements (Stevens, for example, being informed at 6.30 of a meeting that had actually begun at 6)
Even secret screenings of all Mankiewicz's films, in the presence of stenographers, to scrutinise every line for potential subversive intent and for evidence that could be used against him.

It was a conspiracy, Stevens said, and when DeMille protested, Stevens countered: 'The recall committee was nothing to do with the interests of the Guild: it was a merely a symptom of the Board's political orientation. I think this Board at no time worked for the director,' he went on, 'it was interested in nothing except the fight against Communism. But that is not what this Guild is for: there are proper government organisations constituted for that pursuit.'

One person had not yet spoken, and it was felt that his opinion would carry enormous weight, particularly as DeMille at this stage was digging in his heels and refusing to withdraw the recall submission. So one of the grand old men of the Guild signalled his intention to speak, identifying himself for the benefit of the stenographer.. 'My name's John Ford,' he said, 'I make westerns.' He went on: 'I've been listening very carefully tonight, because I've deliberately not read one trade paper, one telegram, one ballot paper, one recall notification.' He paused for a moment and then said: 'I admire Cecil B. DeMille. He makes films for the American public, and he knows what the American people want.' (At that point, Mankiewicz told me, 'my heart stopped… I thought, that's it, my career's over, Ford's going to side with them…'). And then Ford turned to Cecil B. DeMille, looked him straight in the eye, and said: 'But I don't like you, C.B., and I don't like what you've been doing tonight. We organised ourselves into a Guild to protect ourselves against producers…Now somebody wants to turn us into a news service and an intelligence service and give out to producers what looks to me like a blacklist, and I hate blacklists…' When DeMille demurred at this, Ford responded: 'My friend, Merian C. Cooper [an associate of Ford's and co-director of King Kong] was a brigadier general in the Army during the war whose patriotism is unimpeachable, and he tells me it is a blacklist…and he also tells me that if DeMille put a pistol to his head, he wouldn't sign a loyalty oath that was not required by the government…I don't think we should be putting out derogatory information about a director, whether he's a Communist, hates his mother in law, or beats his dog. So I propose we give Joe Mankiewicz a vote of confidence, and all go to bed, because, for Christ's sake, it's twenty past 2 in the morning…' And that's more or less what they did.

The story didn't end there, of course. Mankiewicz might have won that night, and apparently, after that meeting, Stevens drove round and round for fifty miles in sheer exhilaration, thinking this might represent some kind of turning of the tide. But it was to be the only victory for what one might call the liberal faction in Hollywood against the conservatives for some time to come. In 1951, the year after this meeting, HUAC was to resume its investigations; and in 1952, Hollywood is indeed singin' in the rain- i.e. trying to put on a happy face whilst recognising that the climate out there is terrible. Because HUAC is now back in Hollywood, exploiting the widespread climate of fear by now insisting that former Communist party members in Hollywood or sympathisers could only 'purge' themselves by 'naming names' to the Committee, essentially by informing on their former friends. If they refused, on whatever grounds, they would be blacklisted and denied employment. If they co-operated, they ran the risk of a different kind of ostracism, because in the words of the blacklisted writer Walter Bernstein, 'you were collaborating with some very bad people doing very bad things.' The effect on the Hollywood community was to be devastating. It set friend against friend; marriages were wrecked; directors like Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, and John Berry were driven into exile; there were suicides; and, most painfully, there were a whole cycle of betrayals, as they saw them, of the Left by the Left- indeed, by heroes of the Left, like Clifford Odets or Elia Kazan, who named names and were never forgiven (witness the furore that erupted in 1999 when it was announced that Kazan was to be given an honorary Oscar.) 'What is so sad about the American Left,' said Orson Welles, 'was that it betrayed itself, not out of principle, but in order to save its swimming pools.' John Huston, who left America in disgust and was effectively in exile for the next ten years, said: 'A sickness permeated the country. The thing that was most disappointing to me was the submissiveness of the American people. Nobody came to the defence of those being persecuted for personal beliefs guaranteed under our most sacred charter, the Constitution of the United States.'

I began with a sequence from a classic Hollywood film of 1952, Singin' in the Rain, and I'd like to end with an extract from another 1952 classic, where the political overtones are a bit more overt, Fred Zinnemann's High Noon. The writer of the film, Carl Foreman, had been blacklisted and gone into exile in England, but not before he had delivered a script which he said was an allegory of the times- it's about a community corrupted by fear and, for the town of Hadleyville, read Hollywood. You'll know the plot: 3 outlaws have ridden into town and await their leader on the noon train, at which point they plan to avenge themselves on the Marshal (Gary Cooper) who has sent them to prison. The marshal seeks help, but, one by one, people find reasons not to support him and he is left isolated. I want to show the scene where he goes to church to seek help:

EXTRACT

The reason why I showed that scene is that I'm convinced Zinnemann's staging of it comes from his memory of the Screen Director's Guild meeting. As I described, there a crucial intervention came late on from a handkerchief-chewing, John Ford. In High Noon, the crucial intervention comes from a handkerchief-brandishing John Ford regular, Thomas Mitchell, who compliments the Marshal (as Ford did with DeMille) before denouncing his tactics and effectively withdrawing his, and the townspeople's, support- which is what Mankiewicz, for one heart-stopping moment, thought Ford was going to do to him. A postscript: the film was an enormously tense and fraught production, politically and personally; but became a popular classic and a strong Oscar contender, despite a hate campaign against the film led by John Wayne who thought it the most 'unAmerican film he had ever seen'. It won 4 Oscars, including best actor for Gary Cooper; but the best picture award went to Cecil B.DeMille (for The Greatest Show on Earth), and Fred Zinnemann lost out as best director to John Ford for The Quiet Man. Zinnemann told me a funny story about that, but he would never let me print it in case it was misunderstood. Ford said to him one day: 'You know why you lost?' Zinnemann said: 'No, why?' With a rogueish twinkle in his eye, Ford said: 'Because I spread the word in the Academy that you were a Communist.'

Zinnemann thought he was joking. Those were the days.

Neil Sinyard