TRUMBO

The Writer and the Blacklist

Trumbo

            Perhaps out of guilt and shame—if such feelings operate out there—Hollywood has swept an important chapter in its history under a large and colorful rug.  Not even a handful of movies deal with the infamous blacklist that ruined so many careers and lives in the entertainment world back in the 1950s.  The Front, directed by Martin Ritt in 1976, which employed a cast of formerly blacklisted actors, addresses television writers and their use of an amiable dunce (Woody Allen) as a pseudonymous cover for their work, but too often plays the situation for laughs.  Although it starred some accomplished performers, including Robert De Niro and Annette Bening, Guilty By Suspicion (1991), which focuses on a blacklisted director, barely raised an eyebrow.  George Clooney’s much more successful Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) deals directly with the career of the radio and television reporter Edward R. Murrow and his confrontations with Senator Joseph McCarthy, the prototype for the right wing demagogues of our own time.

            Now, almost 70 years after the events, the new movie Trumbo, directed by Jay Roach, provides the best and fullest depiction of the anti-Communist hysteria and subsequent persecution of the 1940s and 1950s, centering on the career of the highly successful screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston).  The docudrama shows the actions of several victims of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), led by an odious Representative named J. Parnell Thomas (James DuMont), in an obvious quest to attract attention from the press and inflame the dependably panicky American public.  That hysteria promoted the careers of a great many politicians, including not only McCarthy, but an obscure Red-baiting congressman from California named Richard Nixon.

            HUAC asserted that the radio, television, and film industry employed a great many Communists and their sympathizers, who attempted in their work to subvert American values and even, in a favorite phrase, to overthrow the government of the United States.  Since most of the accused began their careers as writers, directors, and actors in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, the disastrous result of laissez-faire capitalism (known these days as trickle-down economics), many of them joined various leftist movements to seek some alternative political philosophy, method, and solution.  Marxism presented such an alternative, attracting a great many intellectuals and artists to a number of radical movements and organizations, and some indeed joined the Communist Party.  When America waged the Cold War against the Soviet Union, most of those people found themselves the objects of suspicion and hatred, vilified by politicians, press, and the public.

            Once HUAC decided to pursue Communists, sympathizers, those so-called “fellow travelers” in Hollywood, the reactions, as the picture shows, followed a distressing pattern.  Resolving to resist the ridiculous charges and insinuations, actors, directors, and writers protested publicly; a number traveled to Washington to demonstrate against the actions of the committee.  The reactions of the majority of the film community, however, reveal something less than a profile in courage.  Goaded by the press, including the vicious virago Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren), who blackmails Louis B. Mayer, studio executives caved under pressure and fired the people who had been making their pictures and fattening their incomes.  Many of their coworkers, initially supportive, threatened by the loss of work and the end of their careers, “named names” as the committee demanded, betraying friends and colleagues.  Others, like Dalton Trumbo, defied the committee, asserted their Fifth Amendment rights, and as a result, suffered ostracism, loss of employment, and even in some cases, like Trumbo’s, imprisonment for contempt of Congress.

            The movie shows how after serving his time, Trumbo managed to survive by writing screenplays under pseudonyms in a sort of factory he established in his home, first for Poverty Row schlockmeisters, ultimately for Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas.  He wrote some memorable films—The Brave One, Roman Holiday, Spartacus­—that won numerous awards, including a couple of Oscars that he couldn’t accept in person.   Spartacus was the first to list his name on the credits, which incited Hedda Hopper to deliver a fiery speech to the American Legion about Trumbo’s “treason,” resulting in a boycott of the movie and that right-wing group picketing theaters.  Reminding us of how times have changed, President-elect John F. Kennedy

, a genuine war hero, crossed the Legion’s picket lines to see Spartacus; I wonder if any contemporary politician possesses the courage to make such a gesture.  That act probably assisted in diluting the power of the list and the resurrection of Trumbo’s career.

            Using actors who resemble their real life counterparts—Michael Stuhlbarg as Edward G. Robinson, Dean O’Gorman as Kirk Douglas, Christian Berkel as Otto Preminger, for example—adds a great deal of credibility to a dramatic version of an important piece of history.  The skillful blending of actual footage from the time—newsreel films of HUAC in action, speeches and testimony by a number of Hollywood cowards, including the draft dodgers Ronald Reagan and John Wayne—with the scenes and dialogue of Trumbo, his family, friends, and colleagues both enlivens and authenticates the narrative.  The picture provides an important insight into the history of Hollywood, the history of America; it also demonstrates how the exploitation of fear creates the kind of cultural paranoia that blossoms so fragrantly in the present day.