Un-American Westerns

Per the New York Review of Books:

"The highly popular Broken Arrow (1950), notable for preaching peaceful coexistence between white settlers and their Apache neighbors, was written by (but not credited to) blacklisted red Albert Maltz; released the same year, The Devil’s Doorway, a less commercially successful but more militant brief on behalf of a mistreated Shoshone cavalryman, was written by Guy Trosper (designated a fellow traveler by the FBI) and, unlike Broken Arrow, praised for its political perspicuity by the Daily Worker, which recognized it as an allegory on the situation of African American veterans.

Addressing another aspect of the American West, two blacklisted Communists Lester Cole and Marguerite Roberts, worked at various times on the script for the long-germinating Viva Zapata!, set during the early-twentieth-century Mexican Revolution and celebrating the radical agrarian reformer Emiliano Zapata—although it was ultimately directed, from John Steinbeck’s screenplay, by a former Communist desperate to avoid the blacklist, Elia Kazan. Kazan strenuously promoted Viva Zapata! as an anti-Communist movie until the late ‘60s when he saw it as having a special significance for “disgruntled and rebellious people” throughout the world—a proto–Spaghetti Western."