Ironies in Reagan’s Film Gift to Gorbachev

WASHINGTON —  First Ronald Reagan was finding warmth and hope in the Evil Empire, now he’s embracing the work of a member of the dread Hollywood blacklist.

On Monday in Moscow, the President gave Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev a videotape of a 1956 movie called “Friendly Persuasion,” written by the blacklisted Michael Wilson.

Wilson is described in “The Inquisition in Hollywood,” by Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, as one of the Communists “who remained loyal to the Party through the years of persecution and appreciative of their Party experience.”

If so, he was one of those whose aim was to “gain economic control of the motion-picture industry in order to finance their activities and subvert the screen for their propaganda,” Reagan wrote in his autobiography, “Where’s the Rest of Me?”

The movie starred Gary Cooper, Dorothy McGuire and Anthony Perkins. It was about a Quaker family torn by the conflict between their pacifism and their fears of Confederate attackers. It was also about “not just the tragedy of war,” Reagan told Gorbachev, “but the problems of pacifism, the nobility of patriotism, as well as the love of peace.”

Did Reagan--a former head of the Screen Actors Guild and an activist in the fight to rid Hollywood of Communist Party influence--know who the screen writer was? Wilson got no credit for the “Persuasion” screenplay because of the blacklist. But it’s not as if nobody had ever heard of him.

He had won his first Academy Award for his work on the screenplay of “A Place in the Sun,” which came out in 1951. He went on to win another for his work with Carl Foreman on “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” But that one was posthumous. The blacklist kept both of them from getting either credit or the Oscar.

“Persuasion” won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, according to Victor Navasky, who recalls in “Naming Names” that Wilson told him: “My non-credit on the film gained me more recognition than I would have received had my name been on it.”

Wilson died in 1978. Unlike the President, he didn’t forget. “I’m not one who says, ‘Let bygones be bygones,’ ” Wilson once said. “I don’t defend my attitude in terms of principle. It’s just a visceral reaction, that’s all.”

Now Wilson’s movie is in Moscow, having been carried there by an American president.