Un-American Activities

Director:  Anthony Sherin, Geneviève Mathis

“An investigation is an inquiry into your activities. A witch-hunt is an inquiry into your beliefs.” — Conrad Bromberg, 2022

UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES is the story of how famed character actor J. Edward Bromberg’s life was ruined when he was named a communist before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). It is told through the eyes of his son, 91-year-old screenwriter Conrad Bromberg.

In the 1930s, J. Edward Bromberg and Elia Kazan were friends and members of the Group Theater in New York. By 1940, Bromberg was in Hollywood where his acting career had flourished. Kazan followed him to California, living with Bromberg and his family while he, too, broke into the film industry. Years later, Kazan, by then famous, named Bromberg a communist.

Like many European immigrants, Kazan and Bromberg joined the Communist Party in the 30s because it was the only political party in America that opposed the rise of Adolf Hitler. Democrats and Republicans were silent. But when Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, immigrant members of the party, appalled, left in droves.

After Hitler broke the pact with Stalin, the Soviet Union and the United States joined forces to defeat the Nazis. The U.S. government commissioned Hollywood to make films promoting Russia. As a result, the American public broadly supported the Soviet government.

In 1947, with the onset of the Cold War, members of the U.S. House of Representatives alleged that Communists had infiltrated the Hollywood film industry, and accused studio heads—most of them immigrants—of making Russian propaganda films. The Blacklist began. People in the film industry were forced to implicate one another lest their own careers and lives be destroyed.

Bromberg’s former friends and colleagues avoided him. The FBI harassed him. Under the stress, Bromberg’s health deteriorated. Testifying before HUAC, he pled the Fifth, naming no one. Getting no work in the United States, Bromberg moved to London in 1951, where he starred in a play for three months before dying of a heart attack.

In 1999, many people protested when the Academy of Motion Pictures awarded Elia Kazan a Lifetime Achievement Award. Of the three hundred twenty people who were blacklisted, not one was ever convicted of a crime.

UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES is a timely film as conspiracy-minded politicians concoct propaganda campaigns with dire effects on the public, especially immigrants and other minorities.