Editing Joseph Losey (section)

==Politics and exile==
During the 1930s and 1940s, Losey maintained extensive contacts with people on the political left, including radicals and communists or those who would eventually become such. He had collaborated with [[Bertolt Brecht]] and had a long association with [[Hanns Eisler]], both targets of HUAC's interest.<ref name=gardner /> Losey had written to the [[Immigration and Naturalization Service]] in support of a resident visa for Eisler, who had many radical associations. They had collaborated on a "political cabaret" from 1937 to 1939, and Losey had invited Eisler to compose music for a short public-relations film that he had been commissioned to produce for presentation at the [[1939 New York World's Fair]], ''Pete Roleum and His Cousins''.<ref>{{cite book |last=Palmier |first=Jean-Michel |title=Weimar in Exile: The Antifascist Emigration In Europe And America |year=2006 |publisher=Verso |location=NY |pages=532, 802n131 |isbn=9781844670680 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2UPrsyu3znkC&pg=PA532}}</ref>

Losey had also worked on the [[Federal Theatre Project]], long a target of HUAC. Losey directed the play ''[[Triple-A Plowed Under]]'', which been denounced by HUAC's antecedent, the [[Dies Committee]], as communist propaganda.<ref name=gardner /> His Hollywood collaborators included a long list of other HUAC targets, including [[Dalton Trumbo]] and [[Ring Lardner Jr]].<ref name=gardner />

Losey's first wife [[Elizabeth Hawes]] worked with a wide range of communists and anticommunist liberals at the radical newspaper ''[[PM (newspaper)|PM]]''. After their divorce in 1944, she wrote about working as a union organizer just after World War II, where "one preferred the Communists to the Red-Baiters."<ref>{{cite book |last=Horowitz |first=Daniel |title=Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War and Modern Feminism |year=1998 |pages=129 |publisher=University of Massachusetts Press |isbn=9781558492769 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=szJCHwWNwp8C&pg=PA129}}</ref> At some point, probably early in the 1940s, the [[FBI]] maintained dossiers on both Losey and Hawes, and that of Losey charged that he was a [[Stalin]]ist agent as of 1945.<ref name=gardner />

In 1946, Losey joined the [[Communist Party USA]]. He later explained to a French interviewer:<ref name=gardner />

{{blockquote|I had a feeling that I was being useless in Hollywood, that I'd been cut off from New York activity and I felt that my existence was unjustified. It was a kind of Hollywood guilt that led me into that kind of commitment. And I think that the work that I did on a much freer, more personal and independent basis for the political left in New York, before going to Hollywood, was much more valuable socially.}}

Losey was under a long-term contract with [[Dore Schary]] at [[RKO]] when [[Howard Hughes]] purchased the company in 1948 and began purging it of leftists. Losey later explained how Hughes tested employees to determine whether they had communist sympathies:<ref>{{cite book |editor-last=Milne |editor-first=Tom |title=Losey on Losey |year=1968 |publisher=[[Doubleday & Company]] |location=Garden City, NY |page=73}}</ref>

{{blockquote|I was offered a film called ''[[I Married a Communist (film)|I Married a Communist]]'', which I turned down categorically. I later learned that it was a touchstone for establishing who was a "red": you offered ''I Married a Communist'' to anybody you thought was a Communist, and if they turned it down, they were.}}

Hughes responded by holding Losey to his contract without assigning him any work.<ref name=gardner>{{cite book |last=Gardner |first=Colin |title=Joseph Losey |year=2004 |publisher=[[Manchester University Press]] |pages=8–11 |isbn=9780719067839 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=2dekMDmBz5oC&pg=PA8}}</ref> In mid-1949, Schary persuaded Hughes to release Losey, who soon began working as an independent on ''The Lawless'' for [[Paramount Pictures]].<ref name=gardner /> Soon he was working on a three-picture contract with [[Stanley Kramer]]. His name was mentioned by two witnesses before HUAC in the spring of 1951. Losey's attorney suggested arranging a deal with the committee for testimony in secret. Instead, Losey abandoned his work editing ''[[The Big Night (1951 film)|The Big Night]]''<ref>{{cite book|last=Hoberman|first=J.|author-link=J. Hoberman|title=An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War|url=https://archive.org/details/armyofphantomsam00hobe|url-access=registration|year=2011|publisher=[[The New Press]]|location=NY|page=[https://archive.org/details/armyofphantomsam00hobe/page/174 174]|isbn=9781595580054}}</ref> and left for Europe while his ex-wife Louise departed for Mexico a few days later. HUAC took weeks to try unsuccessfully to serve them with a subpoena compelling their testimony.<ref name=gardner />

After more than a year working on ''Stranger on the Prowl'' in Italy, Losey returned to the U.S. on October 12, 1952. He found himself unemployable:<ref name=gardner />

{{blockquote|I was [in the United States] for about a month and there was no work in theatre, no work in radio, no work in education or advertising, and none in films, in anything. For one brief moment, I was going to do the [[Arthur Miller]] play ''[[The Crucible]]''. Then they got scared because I had been named. So after a month of finding that there was no possible way in which I could make a living in this country, I left. I didn't come back for twelve years.... I didn't stay away for reasons of fear, it was just that I didn't have any money. I didn't have any work.}}

He returned briefly to Rome and settled in London on January 4, 1953.<ref name=gardner />