Alvah Bessie

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alvah Bessie

Alvah Cecil Bessie (born June 4, 1904 in New York City , New York - † July 21, 1985 in Terra Linda , California ) was an American actor , translator , writer and screenwriter who served as a member of the Communist Party of the USA on Participated in Spanish Civil War and was once nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Story. He was one of the so-called Hollywood Ten , a group of ten screenwriters, actors, film producers and directors who refused to testify before the United States House Committee to Investigate "Un-American Activities" into Communist Party membership and were granted in early 1948 Were sentenced to prison terms.

Life

Actor and translator

After attending DeWitt Clinton High School and studying at Columbia University , Bessie worked between 1924 and 1926 as an actor in various theater and musical productions at the Garrick Theater on Broadway, for example in the comedy They Knew What They Wanted by Sidney Howard , the was performed 192 times between November 1924 and October 1925, the comedy Processional by John Howard Lawson , which had 90 performances at the Garrick Theater from January to May 1925 and most recently in the music revue Garrick Gaieties with music by Richard Rodgers and texts by Lorenz Hart , which was performed 211 times between June 1925 and November 1926 under the direction of the playwright Herbert Fields .

He then began his literary career as a translator of French authors into American English such as Pierre Louÿs Les Chansons de Bilitis (1926), Émile Gaborys Barbebleue (1930), Théophile Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin (1930), Octave Mirbeau's Le Jardin des supplices (1931) , René Maran's Batouala. Un véritable roman nègre (1932) and Roger Vercel's Au large de l'Eden (1934).

Writer and participant in the Spanish Civil War

In 1935 his first novel , Dwell in the Wilderness , was published, for which he received a Guggenheim grant . His short story A Personal Issue , published in Scribner's Magazine , won the 1936 O. Henry Prize . He then worked from 1936 to 1937 as a theater editor at the daily newspaper Brooklyn Daily Eagle .

Bessie, a member of the Communist Party of the USA, then took part in the Spanish Civil War as a member of the Lincoln Battalion . He published his war experiences there in the autobiographical book Men in battle: a story of Americans in Spain , which appeared in 1939 and thus a year before the Pulitzer Prize- winning Whom the Hour , in which Ernest Hemingway describes his experiences in the Spanish Civil War had processed.

Like other members of the Communist Party such as Dalton Trumbo , he was an opponent of World War II when the Soviet Union was an ally of the German Reich between 1939 and 1941 . After the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, like many communists, he became a staunch patriot .

Screenwriter, Hollywood Ten, and professional banned

Nine of the Hollywood Ten
Alvah Bessie (3rd from left)

In 1943 he made his debut as a screenwriter for the Raoul Walsh- directed war film Bloody Snow (Nothern Pursuit) with Errol Flynn , Helmut Dantine and Julie Bishop .

At the 1946 Academy Awards , Bessie was nominated for the Oscar for Best Original Story for the war film The Hero of Burma (Objective, Burma !, 1945), also directed by Raoul Walsh, starring Errol Flynn, William Prince and James Brown .

1947 Bessie was before the committee of the US House of Representatives "un-American activities" for the investigation ( US House Un-American Activities Committee charged) to testify about membership in the Communist Party USA. As part of a joint defense instituted by lawyers from the Communist Party, of which Bessie was a member until 1954, he and nine other people ( Edward Dmytryk , Herbert Biberman , Lester Cole , Ring Lardner Jr. , John Howard Lawson (chairman of the CPUSA in Hollywood), Albert Maltz , Samuel Ornitz , Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo) the statements.

This group of screenwriters, actors, producers, and directors, known as the Hollywood Ten, only gave their names and addresses and also declined to be questioned by the committee about their membership in the Screen Writers Guild . The ten relied on the first amendment to the US Constitution because they saw the committee's questioning about their political attitudes as an unconstitutional invasion of their privacy.

As a result, all members of the Hollywood Ten were found guilty of disregard of the US Congress and convicted. Like the others, he was blacklisted , so that from then on he could no longer work in the film industry under his name. In the following period it came to the break of friendships as an actor Lee J. Cobb , who declined Bessie 500 US dollars to borrow to pay for court costs.

Bessie declined under a pseudonym to write for the film industry in Hollywood, and worked instead to finance his livelihood as a writer , literary critic and as a lighting technician in a night club in North Beach (San Francisco) .

Bessie, father of animator, director and producer Dan Bessie , described his experiences during the McCarthy era in the book Inquisition in Eden published in 1965 . Many of his works appear in the Seven Seas Publishers series published by Volk und Welt .

Publications

  • Songs of Bilitis , 1926 (translation by Pierre Louÿs Les Chansons de Bilitis , 1894)
  • Alias ​​Bluebead , 1930 (translation by Émile Gaborys Barbebleue , 1926)
  • Mademoiselle de Maupin , 1930 (translation of Théophile Gautier's eponymous epistle novel , 1835)
  • Torture Garden , 1931 (translation by Octave Mirbeau's Le Jardin des supplices , 1899)
  • Batouala , 1932 (translation by René Maran's Batouala. Un véritable roman nègre , 1921)
  • In Sight of Eden , 1934 (translation of Roger Vercel's Au large de l'Eden , 1932)
  • Dwell in the Wilderness , novel, 1935
  • A Personal Issue , Short Story, 1936
  • Men in battle: a story of Americans in Spain , 1939
  • This is your enemy: a documentary record of Nazi atrocities against citizens and soldiers of our Soviet ally , 1942
  • The Soviet people at war , 1942
  • The Heart of Spain: anthology of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry , 1952
  • The Un-Americans , novel, 1957
  • Bread and a stone. A Novel , 1961
  • Inquisition at Eden , autobiography, 1965
  • The Symbol , 1967
  • Spain Again , 1975
  • One for my baby: a novel , 1980
  • Selections. Alvah Bessie's Short fictions 1982
  • Alvah Bessie's Spanish Civil War notebooks , 2002 (posthumous)
in German language
  • The Drawn: Roman , Berlin 1959 (translation of The Un-Americans by Eduard Klein and Klaus Marschke), new editions 1962 and 1967
  • Das Symbol: Roman , Munich 1970 (translation of The Symbol by Dieter Heuler )

Filmography (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On This Day: “Hollywood Ten” Blacklisted by Movie Studios (November 25, 2011)
  2. ↑ Jennifer E. Langdon: Caught in the Crossfire: Adrian Scott and the Politics of Americanism in 1940s Hollywood , para. 2
personal data
SURNAME Bessie, Alvah
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bessie, Alvah Cecil (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American actor, translator, writer and screenwriter
DATE OF BIRTH June 4, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , New York
DATE OF DEATH July 21, 1985
Place of death Terra Linda , California