Walter Bernstein (August 20, 1919 – January 23, 2021) was an American screenwriter and film producer who was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios in the 1950s because of his views on communism.

[2] He returned to the United States and attended Dartmouth College, where he gained his first writing job, as a film reviewer for the campus newspaper, and where he joined the Young Communist League.

Eventually attaining the rank of Sergeant, he spent most of World War II as a correspondent on the staff of the Army newspaper Yank, filing dispatches from Iran, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, Sicily, and Yugoslavia.

[2] After that he worked for producer Harold Hecht, which resulted in his first screen credit, shared with Ben Maddow, for their adaptation of the Gerald Butler novel for the film Kiss the Blood Off My Hands (1948) for Universal.

[2] He subsequently returned to New York, where he continued writing for The New Yorker and other magazines, and eventually found work as a scriptwriter in the early days of live television.

)[6][7] Bernstein's screenwriting career began to rebound from the blacklist when director Sidney Lumet hired him to write the screenplay for the Sophia Loren movie That Kind of Woman (1959).

[2] The latter film is a drama about a restaurant cashier (played by Woody Allen) with no real talent or political convictions who is hired to act as a "front" for blacklisted television writers during the 1950s.

[12] Bernstein served until his death in 2021 as an adjunct visiting instructor[13] and screenwriting thesis adviser at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in the Department of Dramatic Writing.