He was a recipient of Writers Guild of America Awards including the Ian McLellan Hunter award and the Evelyn F. Burkey award. He was 101. Walter Bernstein, whose career as a top film and television screenwriter was derailed by the McCarthy-era blacklist, and who decades later turned that experience into one of his best-known films, “The Front,” died on Saturday morning at his home in Manhattan. [17] He died of pneumonia on January 23, 2021, at the age of 101. [17][18] He had two children with his first wife Marva Spelman, Joan Bernstein and Peter Spelman; three children with his third wife Judith Braun, Nicholas Bernstein, Andrew Bernstein, and Jake Bernstein. AFI's Top 10: Which second film shoulda been the first? He was a recipient of Writers Guild of America Awards including the Ian McLellan Hunter award and the Evelyn F. Burkey award. [3][11][12] He stepped behind the camera as director of his only feature film, Little Miss Marker (1980), a remake of the 1934 film based on the Damon Runyon story of the same name. Walter Bernstein, the resilient screenwriter who drew upon his ignominious experience on the blacklist in 1950s Hollywood to pen the Oscar-nominated script for The Front, has died. 2016 Imitation of Life: The Blacklist History of 'High Noon' (Video documentary short) Self. Army. [4] He wrote of his experiences in Palestine in an article titled "War and Palestine". In 1994, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Eastern branch of the Screen Writers Guild. [3] He returned back to the United States and attended Dartmouth College, where he gained his first writing job, as a film reviewer for the campus newspaper, and where he joined the Young Communist League. [3] Bernstein made a cameo appearance in Allen's film Annie Hall (1977). Bernstein was born on August 20, 1919, to a Jewish family[1] in Brooklyn, New York, to Eastern European immigrants Hannah (née Bistrong) and Louis Bernstein, a teacher. In his memoirs, he recounts joining the Young Communist League at Dartmouth College in 1937, and the Communist Party itself the year after he left the U.S. It was here that he was exposed first to communist ideas. If dodging the anti-communist blacklist was not enough, Walter Bernstein later scripted a hit film chronicling how he beat the system.The 1976 comedy The Front, starring Woody Allen as … The grip of the blacklist loosened in the late 1950s, and Bernstein’s fortunes picked up when the director Sidney Lumet hired him under his own name to write That Kind of Woman (1959). Women & Men 2: In Love There Are No Rules, Imitation of Life: The Blacklist History of 'High Noon', Tell Us She Was One of You: The Blacklist History of 'Johnny Guitar', Guns for Hire: The Making of 'The Magnificent Seven', The Interviews: An Oral History of Television, Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream. [3] After graduating from high school, he went on to study a six-month immersive language course at University of Grenoble, where he lived with a French family who were acquaintances of his father. [3] He worked uncredited on the screenplays of The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Train (1964), and was one of several writers who worked on the script for the ill-fated Something's Got to Give, which was left uncompleted at the time of the death of its star, Marilyn Monroe, in 1962. 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