Albert Maltz (October 28, 1908 – April 26, 1985) was an American playwright, fiction writer and screenwriter. He was one of the Hollywood Ten who were jailed in 1950 for their 1947 refusal to testify before the US Congress about their involvement with the US Communist Party. They and many other US entertainment industry figures were subsequently blacklisted, which denied Maltz employment in the industry for many years.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Maltz was educated at Columbia University and the Yale School of Drama. During the 1930s, Maltz worked as a playwright for the Theater Union, which was "an organization of theater artists and political activists who mounted professional productions of plays oriented towards working people and their middle-class allies." In 1932, his play Merry Go Round was adapted for a film. At the Theater Union he met Margaret Larkin (1899–1967), whom he married in 1937. He won the 1938 O. Henry Award for "The Happiest Man on Earth", a short story published in Harper's Magazine.

In 1944 he published the novel The Cross and the Arrow, about which Jerry Belcher noted that it was "a best seller chronicling German resistance to the Nazi regime. It was distributed in a special Armed Forces edition to more than 150,000 American fighting men during World War II." In 1970 he published a collection of his short stories Afternoon in the Jungle.

Maltz' first screenwriting credit was for This Gun for Hire (1942). He worked regularly as a screenwriter until his blacklisting; his last assignment for some years was The Robe (1953), although he didn't receive a credit until decades later. In 1960, Frank Sinatra engaged Maltz to write a screenplay for The Execution of Private Slovik, but in the end Sinatra was pressured into dismissing Maltz from the project. Maltz was finally employed again on Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), which was a vehicle for the popular actors Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine. His last credit (as John B. Sherry) is for Hangup (1974).

For his script for the 1945 film Pride of the Marines, Maltz was nominated for an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay. His screenplay for Broken Arrow won the 1951 Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Western. However, due to his blacklisting at the time, fellow MPAA screenwriter Michael Blankfort agreed to put his own name on the script in place of Maltz's as the only way to get it accepted by any of the Hollywood movie studios, and as such, Blankfort was named the winner. In 1991, in the course of correcting screen credits for blacklisted screenwriters, the Writers Guild of America officially recognized Maltz as the only credited screenwriter for Broken Arrow.

In 1978, Jack Salzman published a biography of Maltz.

Biography

Albert Maltz se fait d'abord connaître à Broadway comme dramaturge avant de s'installer à Hollywood en 1942. Politiquement très engagé à gauche, Maltz fit partie des Dix d'Hollywood qui furent victimes du maccarthysme. Après La Cité sans voiles (The Naked City), de Jules Dassin en 1948, son nom disparaît des génériques jusqu'en 1970, année de la sortie de Sierra torride (Two Mules for Sister Sara), de Don Siegel.

Ses plus belles réussites sont au début de sa carrière, notamment avec Tueur à gages (This Gun for Hire) de Frank Tuttle (1942), L'Orgueil des marines (Pride of the Marines) de Delmer Daves (1945), et Cape et Poignard (Cloak and Dagger) de Fritz Lang (1946), où ses qualités d'écriture et ses idées sont les mieux représentées.

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