A former writer for The New Yorker who wrote many distinguished scripts for live TV in the late 1940s, Bernstein earned one feature credit, for "Kiss the Blood Off My Hands" (1948), before being blacklisted in 1950. He returned to film work nine years later, scripting such fine films as Sidney Lumet's "Fail Safe" and John Frankenheimer's "The Train" (both 1964) with Franklin Coen and Frank Davis, and Martin Ritt's "The Molly Maguires" (1970), which he co-produced. His screenplay for "The Front" (1976) was a poignant, embittered portrait of the travails of a circle of screenwriters during the blacklist. Bernstein made his directing debut in 1980 with a rather bland remake of "Little Miss Marker". In the 1990s, he wrote a handful of teleplays, most notably the HBO drama "Miss Evers' Boys" (1997) and adapted his own screenplay of "Fail Safe" for a live CBS broadcast in 2000.