![\"TheInvestigatorstitle\"](\"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/TheInvestigatorstitle.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Investigators<\/i> brought together a group of remarkable left-wing artists during a final post-World War II, Popular Front burst of cultural activity.\u00a0 Not surprisingly, however, this 10-minute musical farce became an orphaned film. It suffered from the Red Scare just like its creators and their colleagues. The blacklist drove them apart as they struggled with job insecurities, exile, stress-related heart attacks and prison. Producer Carl Marzani never mentioned the picture in his five-volume memoir.[1]<\/a> The sons of Abel Meeropol, Michael and Robert, were unaware of either the film or the playscript reproduced in this program. Max Glandbard, who was surprised to have escaped the blacklist and so continued working in film and television, never talked about The Investigators<\/i> though he kept a 16mm film copy of it in his personal collection\u2013\u2013which he passed on to his son Eric. Virtually forgotten, The Investigators<\/i> was never abandoned. Collectively the Marzani, Glandbard and Meeropol families made today\u2019s event possible and turned this occasion into a kind of reunion.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Union Films was an informal collective: its key members were Marzani, Glandbard, Vic Komow and Charles Patton who made over two dozen documentaries and campaign films between 1946 and 1953.\u00a0 With Marzani in charge and the United Electrical Workers (UE) providing the necessary funding, Union Films quickly established its reputation with Deadline for Action <\/i>(September 1946), a forty-minute documentary that took forceful aim at American corporations, particularly General Electric. Marzani, however, was made to pay a price and was quickly indicted for concealing his past ties to the Communist Party.\u00a0 Convicted in May 1947, he remained largely free on appeal and stayed busy making films until he was sent to prison in March 1949. When Union Films began to put credits on its films\u2013\u2013and The<\/i> Investigators<\/i> is the earliest available Union Films production that has such credits\u2013\u2013his name never appeared, principally because the explicit association of a \u201cconvicted red\u201d would have curtailed distribution and exhibition opportunities as well as financing. [2]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The making of The Investigators <\/i>raises a series of unanswered questions.\u00a0 How was the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) involved in The Investigators<\/i>? Founded in April 1946, the CRC focused much of its efforts on the legal defense of labor radicals, with Marzani\u2019s appeals providing one of its early cases.[3]<\/a>\u00a0 Perhaps the CRC helped to find funding for the film. Again, what was the nature and extent of Union Films\u2019 collaboration with Abel Meeropol and Serge Hovey since the production people were based in New York while Meeropol and Hovey may have been living in Los Angeles?\u00a0 (The film was shot in the Union Films studio: a brownstone on 111 West 88th<\/sup> Street, which Marzani had bought early in 1948 when moving back to New York City.) Likewise, how did the John Lenthier Group come into contact with Union Films and what are the names of the actors other than Herschel Bernardi? In fact, although Union Films worked in a range of documentary forms, its staff all had extensive experience in the theater (including former actress Edith Emerson who was married to Carl and played a key behind-the-scenes role in the group).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As an artist, Abel Meeropol is perhaps best known for the words and music of \u201cStrange Fruit,\u201d which achieved iconic form as sung by Billy Holiday, and the lyrics of \u201cThe House I Live In,\u201d sung most memorably by Frank Sinatra and Paul Robeson. Meeropol was, moreover, remarkably productive\u2013\u2013and forcefully political. His poetry often appeared in the New Masses<\/i>, and among his many works in the late 1940s was \u201cThe Ballad of the Hollywood Ten.\u201d[4]<\/a> Since he often reworked his lyrics to fit changing circumstances, there are at least four somewhat different versions of The Investigators. <\/i>An initial version appeared in a July 1946 issue of The New Masses,<\/i> while a later version was published by the National Education Committee of the Jewish Peoples Fraternal Order. [5]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 The version reprinted here is a typescript for the Chicago Arts Committee for Wallace, dated June 1948. It had been judiciously cut and further reworked for the film.\u00a0\u00a0 The New Masses<\/i> version focused on the theme of education as The Victim demanded \u201cAcademic Freedom\u201d rather than \u201cHigher wages\u201d and \u201cNo discrimination.\u201d\u00a0 (Meeropol\u2019s day job had been as a high school teacher). The Chicago Arts Committee For Wallace playscript and the film both replace \u201cThe Straw Man\u201d with a robot and have electoral politics in mind. (A missing title at the end of the film told audiences to vote for progressive candidates.) The film version is tighter than the Chicago Arts playscript, and I have noted both the excisions as well as a few limited additions in the margins in the pages that follow.\u00a0\u00a0 The biggest differences between the New Masses<\/i> version, the Chicago Arts version and the Union Films version are in the endings.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Carl Marzani, The Education of a Reluctant Radical<\/i>, 5 vols. (New York: Topical Books, 1992-1995; Monthly Review Press, 2002).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
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