Television and I grew up together. This is our story. Sixth in a series.
The quintessential English heroes have long been King Arthur
and Robin Hood.
They are foundational
legends within England and known internationally.
In the 1950s, before Lerner and Lowe’s hit musical
Camelot,
the best known of these epic heroes in the US was probably Robin Hood.
So it was fitting that the first television series centered
on Robin Hood was shot in England with English actors for an English TV network
by a production company in England. And
so it must have seemed when episodes of The Adventures of Robin Hood
crossed the Atlantic in 1955 to appear on American television.
But behind the scenes there was another story, with
different heroes. The Adventures of
Robin Hood was scripted primarily by American writers, mostly living in the
U.S. But by a particular category of
American writers.
Even at nine years old (which is what I was as the
1955 fall television season began) I’d heard about the Communist Menace. I saw headlines about it in the newspapers
and was aware of it from television.
The Sisters talked about it at school, as did occasionally the priests
from the Sunday pulpit. They called it
“Godless Communism.” The danger wasn’t
just the Soviet Union, with its atomic bombs threatening to crash down on us
while we hugged our heads under our school desks. It was also Communist subversion-- Communists undercover in our
own country.
There was a kind of hysteria, some of it organized, and an
atmosphere of fear that some stoked for their own advantages. Whatever justification there was for alarm about Soviet
subversion, a combination of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, Senator Joseph McCarthy,
the U.S. House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and allied groups (such
as the American Legion, which led boycotts of movies, etc.) and individuals went much further in
attacking any sort of dissent, political activity or ideas they didn’t like,
for their own political—and in some cases, monetary—profit and power. Opportunism, reactionary politics,
anti-union fury and not just a whiff of anti-Semitism came to characterize this
witchhunt.
The American Communist Party was a registered political
party subject to U.S. laws, and membership in it was not a crime. None of the
accused was ever shown to advocate the violent overthrow of the US
government. In fact, those who resisted
their inquisitors did so as staunch defenders of the Constitution.
Nevertheless, these forces destroyed the livelihoods and
distorted the lives of thousands of Americans, including many with little or no
relationship to the American Communist Party, often with false and flimsy
charges and innuendo. It was cancel
culture writ large—and it affected the entire culture.
It was felt on college campuses and in schools at other
levels, in government, organized religion and other institutions and
businesses. But it had a particular
impact in arts and entertainment—to some extent in the theatre, but mostly in
the movies and television.
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| Ring Lardner, Jr. of the Hollywood Ten |
In 1947, HUAC hearings resulted in contempt charges for
screenwriters and other Hollywood professionals because they refused to name
names of their colleagues.
The ones
indicted became known as the Hollywood Ten. They sold their homes and assets,
and (as Dalton Trumbo said later) prepared to become nobody.
They eventually went to prison for a year.
(Lardner served in the same prison as the congressman who had questioned him—he
had since been convicted of financial fraud.)
Shortly after their indictment, Hollywood studio heads met
at the Waldorf Hotel in Manhattan and issued the Waldorf Statement which
declared that the ten would never work in Hollywood again, and others who were
shown to be communists would not be employed there. This was the origin of the Hollywood Blacklist.
Though the Waldorf statement recognized how easy it would be
to unjustly victimize individuals, that’s exactly what happened. Thanks to a few powerful outlets that
published names, many were condemned for being seen with a suspected communist,
or for involvement in civil rights, civil liberties, labor organizing and other
such causes that the American Communist Party sometimes supported, or simply
for expressing a view. Or by mistake,
or for vengeance, or no reason at all except the need to continually churn out
names.
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| Harry Belafonte |
By the mid-1950s the Blacklist was at its height. Among
those blacklisted were such well known figures as composer Aaron Copland,
conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, band leader Artie Shaw, and folk
singer Pete Seeger; writers Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker,
Arthur Laurents, Dashiell Hammett, and journalists William Shirer, Charles
Collingwood and Howard K. Smith, as well as actors Judy Holliday, Burgess
Meredith, Lee Grant, Zero Mostel, and Will Geer, and director-actor Orson
Welles, directors Joseph Losey and Martin Ritt, among many others.
A conspicuous
number of Black figures in the arts and entertainment were blacklisted, such as
Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson,
Josh White, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee.
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| John Garfield |
Many of the Hollywood actors and writers in particular were
not employed in their industry for seven, ten, twelve or more years. Others,
from big stars like actor John Garfield (who refused to name names) to many
lesser-knowns, lost their careers forever, and some lost their health, their
marriages and in a few cases, their lives to suicide. The blacklist became so institutionalized that it continued well
into the 1960s, and had lingering effects even in the 70s, long after the
McCarthy period was over.
A few
lesser-knowns got some work because of defiant directors and producers: Alfred
Hitchcock employed actor Norman Lloyd, and Robert Wise refused to drop Sam
Jaffe from the cast of the 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still. Both became big TV stars in later decades:
Jaffe as Dr. Zorba in the medical drama Ben Casey, and Lloyd in a later
medical drama, St. Elsewhere.
And one lesser-known actor was saved by Superman. Veteran
film actor Robert Shayne was in the cast of
The Adventures of Superman,
playing police Inspector Henderson, when his wife divorced him, and accused him
of being a Communist. His offense seems
to have been an interest in unionizing.
As he was being investigated, George Reeves, Superman himself, vouched
for him. He was soon a regular on the
show.
But all of this had a profound effect on the culture of
Hollywood (which quickly made some 50 anticommunist propaganda films) and
America in general. Dissent and political activity died down, the narcosis
identified with the 1950s began. It probably wasn’t a coincidence that in the
1940s cartoons Superman fought for truth and justice, but on TV in the 50s he
also fought for the American Way, standing stalwart in front of a huge waving
flag.
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| Brecht |
Hollywood had been energized by the artists and
intellectuals who fled from Germany and elsewhere in Europe to southern
California just before and during World War II. Now in the Blacklist 50s, playwright Bertoldt Brecht led the
exodus back the other way. But the
emigration also included Hollywood hands born in the USA. Some hid out in Mexico, and some fled to
Canada and Europe. Some didn’t come
back for a very long time.
One of these
refugees from repression was Hannah Weinstein, a journalist and political
operative who worked on the New York mayoral campaign of Fiorello La Guardia,
and the presidential campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt. She and screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr. wrote
speeches for Orson Welles and Charlie Chaplin, supporting FDR. All four of them were eventually
blacklisted.
But before anyone could name her name, Weinstein relocated
to Paris in 1950, and then moved to London two years later. There she established a production company,
Sapphire Films.
In 1954, legislation was passed in England to foster
competition with the state-owned British Broadcasting Company (BBC.) A private company developed by Lew Grade
called ITV was hungry for programs, especially the kind that could draw attention
and audience. Hannah Weinstein and Sapphire Films had a proposal he liked.
 |
Producer Hannah Weinstein with
Robin Hood cast members |
The Adventures of Robin Hood went on the air on ITV
in England on September 25, 1955, and a day later in the US, broadcast by CBS
on Monday evenings at 7:30, sponsored by Johnson & Johnson and
Wildroot Cream-Oil hair tonic. It became an immediate hit in both
countries. Its four seasons (three
seasons of 39 episodes each, one season of 26, for a total of 143 half-hour
shows) ran until the end of 1960.
Syndicated re-runs began even before the first run was over, and the
show was often scheduled for Saturday mornings, sometimes with a slightly
different title (“Adventures in Sherwood Forest.”)
It was a triumph for English folklore and free
enterprise. But The Adventures of Robin
Hood had a secret: it was written almost exclusively by blacklisted
American writers, including at least one of the Hollywood Ten, Weinstein’s
former writing partner, and Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ring Lardner,
Jr. It’s been estimated that 22
blacklisted writers worked on episodes for this show, always using
pseudonyms. Most of them still resided
in the US (some because they’d had their passports revoked.)
Their participation had to be kept secret, and it was. A
number of pseudonyms were used so that none would stand out, and they usually
were typical British-sounding names.
Moreover, the Robin Hood series was such a hit that
Weinstein quickly followed with two others widely seen in the US as well as
England:
The Buccaneers and
The Adventures of Sir Lancelot. Lancelot of course was a Knight of the Round
Table, so King Arthur (the other English hero) made it to American TV as well.
More blacklisted writers worked on Lancelot and
The Buccaneers.
Starting in 1956, we could watch Robin Hood and Lancelot
back to back on Monday nights, though we might have to switch the channel to an
NBC station at 8. Also that fall, we saw The Buccaneers on Saturdays at 7:30 p. on CBS.
This was the ironic vengeance of the Blacklist. The blacklisting authorities claimed they
were only concerned with eliminating subversive ideas from being concealed in
American entertainment, and foisted on innocent American viewers. No real Soviet propaganda was ever found
in a Hollywood film or TV show. But
thanks to the Hollywood blacklist, blacklisted writers were now churning out
stories around ideas that the blacklist promoters might well consider
subversive, and the most innocent Americans of all—namely nine year olds—were
watching them every week.
The two features that defined
The Adventures of Robin
Hood to me and my friends are the same two that likely remain in the
memories of those who watched it: the opening shots and the song at the end.
Each episode began with Richard Greene as Robin Hood pulling
back his bowstring and letting the arrow fly, with a whoosh, a whirring sound
and a vibrating plunk as it hit a tree, followed by a drumbeat and the trumpet
flourish. It was one of the most effective sounds associated with any TV show.
Then after the story came the song, sometimes just the
hypnotic chorus: Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen/Robin Hood,
Robin Hood, with his band of men/Feared by the bad, loved by the good/ Robin
Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood.
By the age of nine I was playing regularly with three other
boys, neighbors on each side of our house.
Across our houses on Lincoln Avenue was a fairly large patch of trees and brush (it later hosted lots for three or four houses), that
became our Sherwood Forest. (We noticed
that the Lincoln Road passed through Sherwood, and Robin's band dressed in Lincoln green.)
We immediately got
interested in the quarterstaves that Robin and the outlaws carried and used in
their fights, and in our woods it was easy enough to find and fashion such a
staff. They made satisfying sounds when
we clunked them against one another in our simulated combat.
We actually experienced a double dose of Robin Hood in 1955.
Walt Disney made a Technicolor feature film in 1952, The Story of Robin Hood
starring Richard Todd (some of which was shot in the real Sherwood Forest), and
showed an edited version on his TV show in two parts in November. Robin Hood’s
fight with Little John on a narrow bridge over a river using quarterstaves was
more elaborate than on the TV series.
Our experiments fashioning bows and arrows were less
successful. A few years later, probably
while the Robin Hood series was still on the air, two of my friends—the
brothers who lived across a grass field to the south—were given real fiberglass
bows by their father. We set up targets
and learned to shoot a little, but we couldn’t really use them for play. None of us got good enough to even pretend
to be Robin Hood in an archery contest.
When
The Adventures of Sir Lancelot began in the fall
of 1956, we saw a different style of sword fighting—with the big flat
broadswords, sometimes with shields but sometimes using two hands. These were
also easier to simulate with wood. We also learned the vocabulary of challenge
and acknowledging defeat: “I yield.”
While all this was of first interest, the stories were
satisfying enough that we kept watching.
Unlike Superman, I’d heard of Robin Hood and King Arthur. There was a
long story in the My Book House Books volume In Shining Armor about
Robin Hood, for instance, though it was based on an older version set in the
era of Henry II. The TV series and most
modern versions of Robin Hood place him in the era of Richard the Lionhearted
(Henry’s son) and the Crusades.
Similarly, the legends of King Arthur evolved over the centuries, but
each version of Camelot sets the stage for the next iteration.
So what were the subversive ideas we innocents absorbed? The
most obvious is the best known quality of the Robin Hood legend as it developed
through the centuries: he took from the rich and gave to the poor.
That indeed was almost enough to get Robin Hood himself
blacklisted, or more specifically, banned.
In 1953 a member of the Indiana Textbook Commission called for
eliminating Robin Hood from all educational materials in the state, because
Communists were allegedly advocating Robin Hood’s income equality measures be
emphasized in education.
Although the governor of Indiana also spoke darkly of a
Commie takeover of the Robin Hood legend, the commission didn’t act. Still, the proposal inspired protest by the
“Green Feather Movement” on the Indiana University campus. Five students distributed green feathers all
over campus, with handbills explaining the issue. The local newspaper denounced them as Commie “dupes,” and the
five students were reportedly investigated by the FBI. This was the McCarthy era in small.
Of course this was all nearly 70 years ago. We’re way beyond that sort of thing now.
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| Robin and the Sheriff (Alan Wheatley) |
In the series Robin Hood did make a policy of robbing the
corrupt rich and distributing to the exploited poor. But these acts weren’t
characterized as political. Robin
Hood’s weekly opponent, the Sheriff of Nottingham (played by Alan Wheatley)
often spoke instead of Robin Hood being “sentimental” for helping the poor or
unjustly accused, or rescuing those in trouble. It may seem a curious word now, but in the 50s “sentimental” was
another word for “womanly” or effeminate, unmanly—an echo of the implied charge
against Superman.
This Robin Hood series made it clear that the rich being
robbed were mostly those whose wealth was ill-gotten gain, chiefly by taking
from the poor. To us as children, Robin Hood’s actions just seemed fair, and as
psychologists and parents are aware, children have a very strong sense of
fairness.
But there were story points beyond this, some suggesting
issues relevant to the blacklist itself.
A central conflict of the blacklist era was between those who informed
on others, either out of conviction or to try to save themselves, and those who
refused to name names. Some who did name names (like director Elia Kazan)
ruined careers and lives. Though
blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo famously observed that the blacklist had “only
victims,” some never forgave the informers. So as late as 1999, Elia Kazan’s
honorary Oscar was met with protests and a number of actors in the audience who
refused to applaud or turned their backs.
There were stories in both the Robin Hood and Lancelot
series that dealt with informers and traitors, the unjustly accused and punished,
all the stuff of drama and history beyond the blacklist, but pertinent to what
happened in Hollywood. Similarly, the corrupt Sheriff as well as dishonest
nobles often tried to use Robin Hood and his band as scapegoats for their own
misdeeds and swindles. It’s not much of
a stretch to see that as reflecting the views of the blacklisted.
Many more stories
concerned issues that reflected broadly applicable and widely held convictions
shared by the writers—including perhaps the kind that got them in trouble with
those in power who had a more constricted world view. For example:
In “The Salt King,” a noble with the legal corner on selling
salt creates an artificial shortage by robbing his own shipment, and then
quadruples his prices, until the outlaws of Sherwood foil his plan. In “A Tuck in Time,” Robin Hood prevents the
auction of a primitive cannon powered by “devil’s powder,” temporarily preventing
an arms race.
In “The York Treasure,” Robin stops Malbet, a racist noble
from preventing Jewish refugees from landing. Malbet gives several speeches
railing about the duty of “right thinking people” to keep out “their dirty
kind” with their “low foreign cunning,” to maintain England for the
English.
Malbet—whose actual purpose is
to steal the money that two Jewish citizens have gathered to pay for the
refugees’ passage-- is certain the refugees won’t fight back, but he’s wrong
about that.
In “A Change of Heart,” a lord refuses to allow a small band
of “primitive” Celts from remaining on their land, arguing that in the medieval
schema, they aren’t really people. With
the use of a sleeping potion, Robin convinces the lord that he is actually one
of the Celts, and soon he is arguing that the Celts have human rights, and a
right to their land.
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| Billie Whitelaw |
There’s a preview of women’s liberation in “The Bride of
Robin Hood,” with guest star Billie Whitelaw, who would soon become Samuel
Beckett’s most important collaborator, and would star in several Albert Finney
films, especially
Charlie Bubbles.
Disguised as a boy, she saves Robin’s life with her archery
skills. Speculating on her motives for attacking the Sheriff’s soldiers, Robin
suggests she may have suffered some oppression herself. As she pulls back her hood to reveal her
feminine blond hair, she says, “All my life, beginning in the cradle as a
disgrace because you weren’t born a boy.
They think it’s a waste of time to teach you anything, and then they marry
you off without bothering to consult you.”
(However, the episode soon becomes a conventional comedy.)
Of course there were many more stories with variations on
the standard plots and conflicts, as well as other contemporary topics treated
with a light touch, as when Robin shows a pair of comic juvenile delinquents
the error of their ways, or the Sheriff lays siege to a castle with Robin
inside, where he happily cavorts with Maid Marian.
These were all in the context of adventure stories, with
battles, captures and escapes, and wars of wits between Robin Hood and the
Sheriff. There was considerable humor,
from slapstick to witty banter, aided by guest performers such as the brilliant
comic actor Leo McKern. Donald Pleasance made a deliciously evil King John in
one of five episodes directed by Lindsay Anderson, who later directed the late
1960s cult film,
“If…” that made Malcolm McDowell a star.
The Adventures of Robin Hood was filmed partly in a
British studio and partly on locations, often on the estate of producer Hannah
Weinstein. Richard Greene starred as
Robin Hood throughout, Alexander Gauge as Friar Tuck and Archie Duncan as Little John (except for the
episodes he missed because of injuries from his real life heroics, saving some
visitors to the set from errant animal actors). Alan Wheatley was the sinister but never frightening Sheriff of
Nottingham (replaced in the fourth season by John Arnatt as the deputy
sheriff), and Bernadette O’Farrell was an attractive Maid Marian (replaced by
Patricia Driscoll.)
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| Lee Grant |
As a 9 year old, I’d heard of the Red Menace and a
little about McCarthyism, but I knew nothing about the Blacklist. Nor did I know much about it at 19, or for
some years thereafter.
In fact the
Blacklist had been lost to history until the mid-1970s, when its 1950s reality
was finally admitted. While accepting
her acting Oscar in 1976, Lee Grant was the first to mention that she’d been
blacklisted in the 50s. (Writer Milliard Lampell announced his blacklisting
while accepting a television Emmy a decade earlier.)
The first feature film about the Blacklist was released in
1976, The Front, made by a blacklisted director (Martin Ritt), written
by a blacklisted writer (Walter Bernstein), with several blacklisted actors in
the cast, including Zero Mostel.
That same year, Hollywood
on Trial, the first documentary film on the Blacklist, was nominated for an
Academy Award. It was made by friends
of mine in Boston, and I followed its process from nearly beginning to end,
viewing hours of interview footage that didn’t get into the film, and as far as
I know have never otherwise been seen.
I met several children of the blacklisted, some without knowing they
were at first, and eventually wrote about the effects on their lives. I had in
fact worked with Ring Lardner, Jr.’s son, James, a few years before knowing
much about the blacklist.
It was later in the 70s that I heard that blacklisted
writers had found work on the Robin Hood show, though it’s only been in putting
this post together that I learned many of the details.
In his Spotlight review of
The Adventures of Robin Hood,
Allen W. Wright observed, “Many children of that generation would be inspired
by this series. One professor remarked that show formed the basis of her
morality.”
"Robin Hood ran for four years, generating profits for
everyone concerned,” Ring Lardner, Jr. concluded in his autobiography, “and
perhaps, in some small way, setting the stage for the 1960s by subverting a
whole new generation of young Americans."
But though the connection to the blacklist gives these shows
a giddy emphasis and curiosity they didn’t have at the time, and while I
appreciate the ironies involved, there is the additional irony that these shows
written by blacklisted writers weren’t all that different from others we were
seeing. These were similar to stories
and themes in some other dramas and adventures we watched, including several
already described in this TV and Me series.
And maybe that’s the point.
The blacklist as it evolved was not only dangerous and destructive, it
was arbitrary and capricious. It did
needless damage that lasted for decades, both to individual lives and to movies
and the culture. But though it dampened
adult culture in the conformist 50s, it may have missed the future, thanks in
part to Robin Hood.
