J. Hoberman: When Westerns Were Un-American

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.