The Name Droppers

The House Un-American Activities Committee's 1951-52 hearings on Reds in Hollywood had trouble finding evidence of Communist propagandizing by film, but they did whip up a well-publicized froth of big & little Hollywood names. Last week the names made news again:

P: The professional anti-Red magazine Alert (West Coast counterpart of Counterattack) published, a handy list of 522 Hollywood and Los Angeles "cited Reds," drawn, it said, from the committee hearings, and thoughtfully tacked on the names of their accusers.

P: Twenty-two of the names (including Actor Howard da Silva, Actress Anne Revere, and three of the moviemakers who were shouted out of Silver City, N. Mex. this month for filming the semi-documentary Salt of the Earth) filed suit for a whopping $51,750,000 damages from 17 film companies, two producer associations, 20 top-ranking cinema executives (L. B. Mayer, Howard Hughes, Dore Schary, Sam Goldwyn, et al.), nine Congressmen (including the committee's current Chairman Harold Velde), and two committee investigators. The complaint: that their being named on studio blacklists (for such things as refusal to answer the committee's questions about their political beliefs and affiliations) has made them jobless pariahs in filmland. The outcast 22 demand a permanent injunction against "maintaining any blacklist or policy of blacklisting or discriminating against the plaintiffs . . . with respect to employment in the motion picture industry."

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