Right-Wingers Sabotage Left-Wingers, Sound Familiar?
By Skip Sheffield
The black-listing of brilliant, award-winning, leftist screenwriter
Dalton Trumbo for his political views by the House Un-American Activities
Committee happened while I was still in diapers. All I knew about it was what I
read in history books. With “Trumbo” it is gratifying to get a fuller picture
of this scary time in American history when citizens were penalized for no
crime other than their unpopular political views.
Bryan Cranston gives one of the best performances of 2015
as embattled but indomitable Dalton Trumbo in the movie titled simply “Trumbo.”
Under the direction of Jay Roach (silly comedies “Meet the Parents,” “Austin Powers”), John
McNamara’s screenplay does not hew too closely to facts, but it gets the main
truths right. Trumbo and nine of his Hollywood screenwriter comrades were in
1947 called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) to
state whether they now, or ever had been a member of the Communist Party. HCUA
was a pet project of ambitious right-wing Sen. Joe McCarthy, who is not a
character in this story. In his place is the vicious and equally ambitious
gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, played with fiendishly wicked glee by Helen
Mirren. In her corner is actor John Wayne (David James Elliott), who had become a
super-patriot although he never served in any service.
Trumbo’s ever-loyal wife Cleo is played by a serene Diane
Lane. Her serenity and loyalty is tested to its limit when Trumbo and his
fellow members of the “Hollywood 10” were convicted of contempt of court for
refusing to answer. Trumbo served prison time and he and the rest of the
Hollywood 10 could no longer work at their trade.
Trumbo’s solution was to keep writing at a fraction of what
he had been earning, assigning the credits to fictitious authors. Most of the
scripts he sold to unscrupulous, pugnacious small studio owner Frank King (John
Goodman), who didn’t care where a script came from as long as it sold tickets.
Living under greatly reduced circumstances, Trumbo kept churning
out scripts, sitting in a bathtub and chain-smoking the cigarettes that would
eventually give him lung cancer and kill him as they did his best friend Arlen
Hird (Louis C.K.) before him.
Happily two men came along to help Trumbo break the black
list. Actor Kirk Douglas (Dean O’Gorman) hired him to write the screenplay for
“Spartacus.” Producer Otto Preminger (Christian Berkel) really broke the ban
when he asked Trumbo to write the screenplay for “Exodus” and insisted his name
be listed on the credits.
Trumbo received belated recognition and even Oscars such as
1953’s “Roman Holiday,” for which he never received credit at the time.
Best-known as Walter White the unhinged meth-maker of “Breaking Bad,” Cranston
shows an amazing versatility in his portrayal of a defiant man who refused to
be broken.
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