Irish-born James Kevin McGuiness (1894-1950) emigrated to the United States aged ten, and grew up to be a screenwriter, producer and cheerleader for the HUAC witch hunt.
McGuiness started out as a jobbing writer, including for the New Yorker, before travelling to Hollywood in 1927. He wrote his first scripts for Fox, where he was also given an opportunity to supervise the production of Romance of the Underworld (1928). In the same year, he collaborated with Howard Hawks on the story for Hawks’s best-known silent picture, A Girl in Every Port (1928).
McGuiness’s film career was not particularly prestigious, but he became an influential figure in Hollywood after co-founding The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944. This was a right-wing, anti-union, antisemitic pressure group set up in opposition to what it called “Communists, radicals and crackpots”. McGuiness was a prominent friendly witness at the HUAC hearings.
The best film written by McGuiness was also his last, John Ford’s Rio Grande (1950), which was released shortly before his death.
In 1933, McGuiness was one of several writers who worked uncredited on the screenplay for MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle, something he also did for Ice Follies of 1939. In between, he wrote the original story for the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, little of which was actually used.
