TRUMBO
Directed by Peter Askin
Written by Christopher Trumbo
Starring Dalton Trumbo, Joan Allen, Brian Dennehy
Released in 2007
Directed by Peter Askin
Written by Christopher Trumbo
Starring Dalton Trumbo, Joan Allen, Brian Dennehy
Released in 2007
Their names have shadowed into crystalline mist, vanishing into the morning sunrise. Yet, on some of the quieter dawns, we can still hear the whispered screams: Bertolt Brecht. John Garfield. Herbert Biberman. Lester Cole. Albert Maltz. Adrian Scott. Samuel Ornitz. Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr. John Howard Lawson. Alvah Bessie. Dalton Trumbo. Twelve names in all. Brecht answered HUAC's questions, then fled to Europe. Garfield was never seriously considered, despite having been a member of the Group Theatre. The remaining Hollywood names became grouped as one: The Hollywood Ten. The most celebrated of these was Dalton Trumbo.
HUAC was the House un-American Activities Committee, a group of some of the members of the 83rd U.S. Congress who, in 1947, began investigating--along with the diabolic head of the Motion Pictures Industry Council Roy Brewer--members of the Hollywood community, particularly those whose work was important enough to cause their political affiliations to be of concern to the committee.
Friendly witnesses such as Elia Kazan decided to name names. What names? The names of people they knew or suspected to be members of the Party. Usually the question would come like this: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party? The reason this question was so problematic was that if the person being asked it were to say yes, then the follow-up question would be: Who else do you know in that capacity? and that was a question none of the Ten wanted to answer. Rather than seeking a Fifth Amendment remedy to the question, the Ten relied on the First Amendment, believing that their right to freedom expression and concomitant right to join together in private were protected under the first addendum to the Constitution. The Supreme Court felt otherwise and the Ten were found guilty of contempt of Congress.
A lot of good works have been made about this despicable time in post-war America. None have hit the point as well as the book Naming Names by Victor Navasky and certainly no film has captured the horrors of this period as well as Trumbo (2007). Regarding the book, the best review ever written about it comes from Alvah Bessie.
Trumbo, the movie, is an amazing visual document, with no less than nine great actors playing the part of Dalton Trumbo, author of Eclipse and Johnny Got His Gun, and screenwriter for Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, Roman Holiday, The Brave One, Spartacus, Exodus, and Papillon, among many others. They sent this man to prison for Contempt of Congress. When you hear people such as Michael Douglas, Joan Allen, Donald Sutherland, Brian Dennehy, Nathan Lane and Liam Neeson read Trumbo's letters as if they were Trumbo, you will begin to grasp the agonizing horror that was committed against these ten people, against the country of the United States, and against children who--like myself, probably like you--had not even been born at the time.
While I would not be so rotten as to betray one line of this film's dialogue and risk robbing from you the opportunity to be blown away by the words and their amazing deliveries, I do think that a couple of quotes from outside the film are in order. These two remarks regard democracy.
"Democracy means that people can say what they want to. All the people. It means that they can vote as they wish. All the people. It means that they can worship God in any way they feel right, and that includes Christians and Jews and voodoo doctors as well."
And:
"Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for."
It is extremely difficult to watch the last ten minutes of the 1960 version of Spartacus (the first was made in 1913!) without wishing that we could go back in time and say to the men who went to the ranch to arrest the writer: "I'm Trumbo!"
HUAC was the House un-American Activities Committee, a group of some of the members of the 83rd U.S. Congress who, in 1947, began investigating--along with the diabolic head of the Motion Pictures Industry Council Roy Brewer--members of the Hollywood community, particularly those whose work was important enough to cause their political affiliations to be of concern to the committee.
Friendly witnesses such as Elia Kazan decided to name names. What names? The names of people they knew or suspected to be members of the Party. Usually the question would come like this: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party? The reason this question was so problematic was that if the person being asked it were to say yes, then the follow-up question would be: Who else do you know in that capacity? and that was a question none of the Ten wanted to answer. Rather than seeking a Fifth Amendment remedy to the question, the Ten relied on the First Amendment, believing that their right to freedom expression and concomitant right to join together in private were protected under the first addendum to the Constitution. The Supreme Court felt otherwise and the Ten were found guilty of contempt of Congress.
A lot of good works have been made about this despicable time in post-war America. None have hit the point as well as the book Naming Names by Victor Navasky and certainly no film has captured the horrors of this period as well as Trumbo (2007). Regarding the book, the best review ever written about it comes from Alvah Bessie.
Trumbo, the movie, is an amazing visual document, with no less than nine great actors playing the part of Dalton Trumbo, author of Eclipse and Johnny Got His Gun, and screenwriter for Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, Roman Holiday, The Brave One, Spartacus, Exodus, and Papillon, among many others. They sent this man to prison for Contempt of Congress. When you hear people such as Michael Douglas, Joan Allen, Donald Sutherland, Brian Dennehy, Nathan Lane and Liam Neeson read Trumbo's letters as if they were Trumbo, you will begin to grasp the agonizing horror that was committed against these ten people, against the country of the United States, and against children who--like myself, probably like you--had not even been born at the time.
While I would not be so rotten as to betray one line of this film's dialogue and risk robbing from you the opportunity to be blown away by the words and their amazing deliveries, I do think that a couple of quotes from outside the film are in order. These two remarks regard democracy.
"Democracy means that people can say what they want to. All the people. It means that they can vote as they wish. All the people. It means that they can worship God in any way they feel right, and that includes Christians and Jews and voodoo doctors as well."
And:
"Everybody now seems to be talking about democracy. I don't understand this. As I think of it, democracy isn't like a Sunday suit to be brought out and worn only for parades. It's the kind of a life a decent man leads, it's something to live for and to die for."
It is extremely difficult to watch the last ten minutes of the 1960 version of Spartacus (the first was made in 1913!) without wishing that we could go back in time and say to the men who went to the ranch to arrest the writer: "I'm Trumbo!"
