Walter Bernstein

In February 1941 Bernstein was drafted into the US Army Eventually attaining the rank of Sergeant he spent most of World War II as a correspondent on the staff of the Army newspaper Yank filing dispatches from Iran Palestine Egypt North Africa Sicily and Yugoslavia He wrote of his experiences in Palestine in an article entitled War and Palestine Bernstein wrote a number of articles and stories based on his experiences in the Army many of which originally appeared in The New Yorker These were collected in Keep Your Head Down his first book published in 1945 Bernstein first came to Hollywood in 1947 under a tenweek contract with writerproducerdirector Robert Rossen at Columbia Pictures Following that stint he worked for a while for producer Harold Hecht which resulted in his first screen credit shared with Ben Maddow for their adaptation of the Gerald Butler novel Kiss the Blood Off My Hands for the 1948 Universal film He subsequently returned to New York where he continued writing for The New Yorker and other magazines and eventually found work as a scriptwriter in the early days of live television In 1950 because of his numerous leftwing political affiliations and related activities his name appeared in the notorious publication Red Channels and as a result he found himself blacklisted Throughout the 1950s however he managed to continue writing for television both under pseudonyms and through the use of fronts nonblacklisted individuals who would permit their names to appear on his work In this manner he contributed to several notable TV programs of the era including Danger the CBS News docudrama series You Are There and the mystery series Colonel March of Scotland Yard It has been incorrectly stated in some sources that Bernsteins blacklisting resulted from unfriendly testimony given to HUAC in 1951 but in fact he was not subpoenaed by the Committee until the late 1950s and never actually testified His screenwriting career began to rebound from the blacklist when director Sidney Lumet hired him to write the screenplay for the 1959 Sophia Loren movie That Kind of Woman From then on Bernstein was able to work openly on films such as Paris Blues 1961 and FailSafe 1964 He also contributed without receiving credit to the screenplays of The Magnificent Seven 1960 and The Train 1964 and was one of several writers who worked on the script for the illfated Somethings Got to Give which was left uncompleted at the time of the death of its star Marilyn Monroe in 1962