Sidney Buchman

Born to a Jewish family in Duluth, Minnesota, Buchman was an intellectual who studied at the University of Minnesota, Columbia, and Oxford, and tried the theater in London and on Broadway before the sound revolution drew him to Hollywood. He landed at Columbia Pictures, where the mogul Harry Cohn came to regard him as the studio's most literate and reliable craftsman, the man to bring polish, structure, and moral weight to a project.

Buchman's great subject was decency under siege. He wrote, without full credit at the time, much of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Frank Capra's stirring drama of an idealistic young senator battling entrenched corruption, one of the defining statements of American movie idealism. He gave the same theme a lighter, metaphysical turn in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, the enchanting fantasy of a boxer sent back to earth in the wrong body, which won him the Academy Award for its screenplay in 1941. He also wrote the sophisticated comedy Holiday and the wartime plea for tolerance The Talk of the Town, and served a term as president of the writers' guild.

His politics undid him. Buchman had belonged to the Communist Party in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and when the House Un-American Activities Committee came for Hollywood he admitted his own membership but flatly refused to inform on anyone else. For that refusal he was cited for contempt of Congress, fined, and blacklisted, his flourishing career at Columbia abruptly ended.

He went into exile in the south of France. Eventually Twentieth Century-Fox, defying the ban, quietly hired him to work in its European operation, and he returned to screenwriting in the 1960s, contributing to the troubled epic Cleopatra and adapting Mary McCarthy's The Group. He died in France in 1975, a writer of grace and conscience whose finest films still argue for the very integrity that cost him so much.