Following his experience with the Hollywood Blacklist, Stander moved to Europe, where he appeared in many genre films, including several Spaghetti Westerns.

[3] Like many New York-based stage actors, Stander found additional work in movie short subjects filmed in New York.

Deeds Goes to Town (1936) with Gary Cooper, Meet Nero Wolfe (1936) playing Archie Goodwin, The League of Frightened Men (1937), and A Star Is Born (1937) with Janet Gaynor and Fredric March.

[citation needed] Stander's distinctive rumbling voice, tough-guy demeanor, and talent with accents made him a popular radio actor.

Stander played the role of Spider Schultz in both Harold Lloyd's film The Milky Way (1936) and its remake ten years later, The Kid from Brooklyn (1946), starring Danny Kaye.

[citation needed] Also during the 1940s, he played several characters on The Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda animated theatrical shorts, produced by Walter Lantz Productions.

Stander also supported the Conference of Studio Unions in its fight against the Mob-influenced International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE).

Also in 1937, Ivan F. Cox, a deposed officer of the San Francisco longshoremen's union, sued Stander and a host of others, including union leader Harry Bridges, actors Fredric March, Franchot Tone, Mary Astor, James Cagney, Jean Muir, and director William Dieterle.

Regarding his political beliefs, Stander once described himself as "lefter than the Left" and said he supported the Communist Party USA prior to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (which he opposed).

"[5] In 1938, Columbia Pictures head Harry Cohn allegedly called Stander "a Red son of a bitch" and threatened a US$100,000 fine against any studio that renewed his contract.

[6] At a grand jury hearing in Los Angeles in August 1940—the transcript of which was leaked to the press—John L. Leech, the self-described former "chief functionary" of the L.A. Communist Party, named Stander as a CP member, along with more than 15 other Hollywood notables, including Franchot Tone, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Luise Rainer, Clifford Odets and Budd Schulberg.

Then, with HUAC's attentions focused elsewhere due to World War II, he played in a number of mostly second-rate pictures from independent studios through the late 1940s.

[8] In March 1951, actor Larry Parks, after pleading with HUAC investigators not to force him to "crawl through the mud" as an informer, named several people as Communists in a "closed-door session", which made the newspapers two days later.

At a HUAC hearing in April 1951, actor Marc Lawrence named Stander as a member of his Hollywood Communist "cell", along with screenwriters Lester Cole and Gordon Kahn.

Finally, in May 1953, he testified at a HUAC hearing in New York, where he made nationwide front-page headlines by being uproariously uncooperative, memorialized in the Eric Bentley play, Are You Now or Have You Ever Been.

In 1966, Roman Polanski cast Stander in his only starring role, as the thug Dickie in Cul-de-sac, opposite Françoise Dorléac and Donald Pleasence.

Stander stayed in Europe and eventually settled in Rome, where he appeared in many spaghetti Westerns, most notably playing a bartender named Max in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West.

His final theatrical film role was as a dying hospital patient in The Last Good Time (1994), with Armin Mueller-Stahl and Olivia d'Abo, directed by Bob Balaban.