Sam Spade and the Blacklist

BLACKLISTING SAM SPADE, DASHIELL HAMMETT, & HOWARD DUFF

How the Blacklist cost an actor, a writer, and an audience.

I am a great fan of old time radio shows. One of the best ever I think, and my absolute favorite is The Adventures of Sam Spade, Detective, starring Howard Duff. The radio show debuted in 1946. Of course, Sam Spade is the hard-boiled detective as portrayed in The Maltese Falcon written by Dashiell Hammett. The film of The Maltese Falcon, starring Humphrey Bogart is often listed on many critics "Best Of" lists. It certainly appears on mine. But a decade after that film, Duff retooled the character for radio, making it his own. Paired with Lurene Tuttle as Effie, the actor with the distinctive voice paired toughness with good humor to make the radio show a big hit. The scripts, although not written by Hammett, excelled. They were clever and engaging, and Duff mostly steered clear of the "smart-ass" detective style that so many other actors employed.

It all came to an end though. The blacklist ruined the careers of many during the late 40s and early 50s. Duff got blacklisted. The film, stage, and radio actor, a veteran of WWII, appeared on a mailing list for a communist front. He had supported a candidate for president that the "Reds" had supported--no one ever claimed Duff was a communist, nor was he ever linked with any Red organization. Duff got fired from the Sam Spade radio show, and became unemployable in Hollywood. After a year off the air, the Sam Spade radio show reappeared on a different network, with a different actor as Spade. And, though Sam Spade was the product of Hammett's Maltese Falcon, the writer's name was taken off the show entirely. The new show, while still well-written and acted, lacked but one thing--Duff.

Hammett. for his part was a communist. A veteran of both WWI and WWII--he served in the Aleutians in the second war--the writer had always been a political activist. It is worthwhile to mention here perhaps, that the U.S., Britain, and the Soviet Union were allies in WWII. Nonetheless, communism, perhaps rightly, became a pariah after the war ended. The USSR took control of many Eastern European countries and turned them into police states. This piece is not about the merits or lack of merits of communism, but about the harm of blacklisting in a democracy. After the war, Hammett joined and later headed the Civil Rights Congress. That organization, declared a communist front by the Washington Red hunters, made it certain that Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, would be blacklisted. Ultimately, the writer, who refused to cooperate with the U.S. Congress, ended up in federal prison.

Hammett never really recovered from the blacklisting. He'd suffered from tuberculosis after WWI, and was unable to live alone. He spent the last four years of his life living as a virtual hermit in the company of the author Lillian Hellman. The crime writer died in 1961 of lung cancer.

Howard Duff's story is a little happier. He'd married Ida Lupino, and through her influence, after the Red scare, Duff got more work in films and then later, in television.

In Santa Barbara, I saw Duff in an audience of an event I was attending. This was probably the same year he died. At the end of the event, I got up and shook his hand. Admittedly, I was so excited to meet him I forgot why I thought him so wonderful. I'd been listening to Sam Spade radio shows for years, but perhaps I was star-struck. I told him what a great voice he had, then left him alone. I may have been one of the few people in an audience of several hundred who recognized him. He passed on 1990. FC

This is a link to an example of a Sam Spade show starring Howard Duff.  Thanks to Old Radio World.

http://www.oldradioworld.com/media/SamSpade_48-07-04_106_TheRushlightDiamondCaper_CBS.mp3