Walter Bernstein
Late in the summer of 2019, screenwriter Walter Bernstein, probably best known for his work with Martin Ritt on
Paris Blues (1961) and
The Front (1976) and with Sidney Lumet on
Fail Safe (1964), turned one hundred. To mark the occasion, his good friend of thirty years, novelist Walter Mosley, interviewed him for Literary Hub. “In all my adult life,” wrote Mosley, “I have never met a more intelligent, loving, sensitive, questioning, heroic man.”
Bernstein, who passed away over the weekend at the age of 101, grew up in Brooklyn among left-leaning Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Early on, as a teen during the Depression, he developed a sense that “the system was out of whack,” as he told Camera in the Sun editor Christian Niedan in 2013. “There was something wrong there that was