Louise Rousseau

Last updated
Louise Rousseau
Born
Louise S. Rousseau

July 22, 1910
Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA
DiedSeptember 25, 1981 (aged 71)
Ojai, California, USA
Education Massachusetts Institute of Technology
OccupationScreenwriter
SpouseJohn Belding (m. 1930)

Louise Rousseau (1910-1981) was an American screenwriter known primarily for penning B Westerns in the 1940s. [1]

Contents

Biography

Louise was born in Provincetown, Massachusetts, to Louis Rousseau (a famous French tenor) and Frances Simkins (daughter of a prominent Texas lawyer). [2]

Her parents split up when she was a baby; her father returned to France, and she was sent to Texas to live with her aunts. [3] She later reconnected with her father in 1932. [2]

After graduating high school at age 15, she studied chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [4] After school, she became a secretary to the manager of the Rivoli Theatre in New York before moving on to Pathe, where she became the assistant of Frank Donovan. [5]

Early on in her Hollywood career, Rousseau worked as a director (one of very few women at the time) of newsreels at Pathe-RKO. [4] She later made a living writing low-budget Westerns — at least until she was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. [6] [7]

HUAC testimony

As Counsel Frank S. Tavenner Jr. ran through the standard litany of introductory questions, the customary education query inadvertently set the stage for Rousseau's preemptive rebuttal. "My most important education was gained at my grandmother's knee," protested the audibly outraged writer, who then proceeded to recount lessons learned regarding her heritage as an American, descended from the Huguenots who landed at Jamestown in 1617—those same Huguenots whose somewhat less distant descendants had joined a revolution to transform that colony into a sovereign nation. [8]

Following this unsolicited history lesson, the inevitable "Are you now or have you ever been" litmus test predictably resulted in the sole instance of Rousseau resorting to a stock response—or, rather, non-response (although she did, much to spectators' amusement, volunteer the characterization of her pre-Blacklist employment as writing "historical westerns dealing with the efforts of the little people to overthrow the big people"). [9] [a] Before concluding her testimony, Rousseau made sure to get the following remarks on the record.

There has come a time in the life of each generation when they must make a stand. And this is the time when I must make mine. I know that when enough people in this country understand what is happening to their basic human rights they too, will make that stand and the Un-American Committee and the hysteria it has created will be driven into the oblivion of those other kangaroo courts which have cropped up in the moments of unreason in our country. Knowing this history, I would indeed be a poor, crawling creature should I surrender lightly to this, or any other un-American [sic] committee, my heritage of 344 years. [8]

Selected filmography

Notes

  1. ↑ As it happens, the Associated Press—via that brief Rousseau item and another, more extensive article published the same day—provides a novel and dramatically divergent side-by-side comparison, at least as laid out in that day's Kansas City Times , between two HUAC witnesses: the resolutely defiant Rousseau and fellow female B-Western scripter Elizabeth Wilson (wife of director Richard Wilson); the latter being, by contrast, an openly avowed, utterly repentant—and, as duly noted by AP, "honey-haired [and] beaut[iful]"—ex-Party member and fully cooperative witness whose interview evidently took place on the same day. [10]

References

  1. 1 2 Catalog of Copyright Entries: Third series. 1947.
  2. 1 2 "Meets Father for First Time". The Post-Crescent. 28 Mar 1932. Retrieved 2019-10-07.
  3. ↑ Kahn, Alexander (4 Nov 1940). "Hollywood Film Shop". The Montana Standard. Retrieved 2019-10-07.
  4. 1 2 "Nothing Tops Experience, Declares Youngest Woman Screen Director". Wilkes-Barre Times Leader. 7 Dec 1940. Retrieved 2019-10-07.
  5. ↑ "29 Dec 1940, 8 - Quad-City Times at Newspapers.com". Newspapers.com. Retrieved 2019-10-07.
  6. ↑ "Social Significance Seen in Horse Operas". Newspapers.com. 22 Sep 1951. Retrieved 2019-10-07.
  7. ↑ "Actress Mum". The San Francisco Examiner. 22 Sep 1951. Retrieved 2019-10-07.
  8. 1 2 Glenn, Charles (October 28, 1951). "The Un-Americans in Hollywood; Her Heritage as an American; Press Ignored Her Statement". Daily Worker Sunday Magazine . p. 4. Retrieved May 2, 2025. "In a voice trembling with anger Miss Rousseau answered the usual questions about the date and place of her birth, etc.. Then came the usual question about her schooling. Miss Rousseau startled the Committee with 'My most important education was gained at my grandmother's knee.' She told of how her grandmother told her of her heritage as an American, a descendant of Huguenots who had landed at Jamestown in 1617, and of how her forefathers had 'joined a revolution' to found the United States. With a show of exasperation the Committee listened to a believer in Americanism, and then the fat man asked his usual question, 'Are you a member of the Communist Party?' She refused to answer this question, as had others before her, on the grounds that an answer might tend to incriminate her and that the Fifth Amendment offered her immunity from such testimony. The Committee, faced by a witness who knew and loved the Bill of Rights, which they neither observed nor respected, excused Miss Rousseau, but not before she had entered into the record a statement for the Committee's reckoning."
  9. ↑ Associated Press (September 22, 1951). "Westerns Have 'Historic' Role, One Witness Avows". The Kansas City Times . p. 10. Retrieved May 2, 2025. "Hi yo, comrades, social significance in horse operas? Louise Rousseau, who declined to tell the House unAmerican activities committee today whether she is a Communist, said her profession is writing westerns. She drew a good laugh from the gallery when she said she wrote 'historical westerns dealing with the efforts of the little people to overthrow the big people.'"
  10. ↑ Associated Press (September 22, 1951). "Glamour in Red Probe; Hollywood Communists Infiltrated, Beauty Reveals; A Honey-Haired Western-Writer Tells How Party Members Took Over Political Organizations". The Kansas City Press. p. 10. Retrieved May 2, 1951. "A honey-haired beauty who writes western movies told the House Un-American Activities committee how Communists took over Hollywood political organizations to promote Russian policy. The witness, Mrs. Elizabeth Wilson, 37, testified she had been enlisted into the Young Communist league in 1937 by Budd Schulberg, novelist, after taking part in several film-town political groups, she declared she left Hollywood in the war but returned to attend Communist meetings to in 1947. She resigned, she added, when she 'stopped believing in the infinite grade will and the will for peace of the Soviet Union.' Mrs. Wilson, the twenty-ninth and the most glamorous witness to appear before the committee investigating communism in Hollywood, became a secretary in of the Anti-Nazi league in 1936."
  11. ↑ Pitts, Michael R. (2012-11-28). Western Movies: A Guide to 5,105 Feature Films, 2d ed. McFarland. ISBN   9780786463725.
  12. ↑ Institute, American Film (1999). The American Film Institute catalog of motion pictures produced in the United States. F4,1. Feature films, 1941 - 1950, film entries, A - L. University of California Press. ISBN   9780520215214.

Louise Rousseau at IMDb

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