Walter Bernstein, whose career as a top film and television screenwriter was derailed by the McCarthy-era blacklist, and who decades later turned that experience into one of his best-known films, “The Front,” died Jan. 23 at his home in Manhattan. He was 101.

“I was still in Hollywood in 1947 during the Hollywood Ten,” Mr. Bernstein said, referring to the prosecution of writers, producers and directors who had appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to answer questions about their Communist affiliations.  No one took the hearings seriously at first, but they soon would. Mr. Bernstein was considered untouchable both in Hollywood and in New York.

Mr. Bernstein and other blacklisted writers were forced to work under assumed names for sympathetic filmmakers. It was during this period that Mr. Bernstein and his colleagues began the ruse of protecting their anonymity by sending stand-ins to represent them at meetings with producers, a ploy later dramatized in “The Front.”

Six decades after the fact, Mr. Bernstein voiced a warmly nostalgic view of the Red Scare period. “I look back on that period with some fondness in a way, in terms of the relationships and support and friendships,” he told The New York Times. “We helped each other during that period. And in a dog-eat-dog business, it was quite rare.”