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Green Mountain Film Festival: Trumbo
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It’s a great irony that the 1950s, arguably the most artistically rich decade for Hollywood, was also its morally bleakest. The decade that produced such masterpieces as Sunset Blvd., Singin’ in the Rain, Rear Window, and The Searchers was also the period of the most ignominious stain on Hollywood’s legacy: the blacklist.
The Hollywood blacklist began in 1947, when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), in an attempt to root out the Communist menace that was ostensibly tainting the minds of decent God-fearing Americans, summoned suspected Red sympathizers to testify. Over the next several years, those accused were faced with the choice of ratting on their friends and colleagues and keeping their jobs, or refusing to testify and risking an industry ban.
Some, like Elia Kazan (whose On the Waterfront can be read as a defense of his actions), named names and went on to have long and distinguished careers. Others, most notably the ten who cited the First Amendment and refused to testify, were barred from working in Hollywood.
The “Hollywood Ten” were Alvah Bessie (Objective, Burma!), Herbert J. Biberman (Salt of the Earth), Lester Cole (Objective, Burma!), Edward Dmytryk (Crossfire), Ring Lardner Jr. (Woman of the Year), John Howard Lawson (Sahara), Albert Maltz (The Naked City), Samuel Ornitz (Hell’s Highway), Adrian Scott (Crossfire), and Dalton Trumbo, who is the subject of a 2007 documentary titled Trumbo screening at the Green Mountain Film Festival.
Of this group, Biberman and Dmytryk were directors, Scott a producer, the rest writers. In 1950, after several unsuccessful appeals, they were sent to prison for one year terms for contempt. Dmytryk later recanted, was released from jail early and testified before the Committee, accusing, among others, Lawson, Scott, and Maltz of planting Communist propaganda in American movies. Dmytryk’s name was removed from the blacklist and he went on to direct such notable films as The Sniper (starring outspoken HUAC cooperator Adolphe Menjou) and The Young Lions. The others, including Trumbo, continued to be tinsel town pariahs after their release from the big house and could only work through “fronts,” ghostwriting scripts with others’ names attached.
Trumbo, directed by Peter Askin from a script by Trumbo’s son Christopher (who also penned the stage play), captures this dark period in Trumbo’s life through a combination of archival footage and staged soliloquies of Trumbo’s letters, delivered with forceful eloquence by Joan Allen, Brian Dennehy, Michael Douglas, Paul Giamatti, Nathan Lane, Josh Lucas, Liam Neeson, David Strathairn, and Donald Sutherland.
In this age of e-mails, instant messaging and texting, the hand or type-written letter has been all but embalmed and mummified. But there was a time when a letter sent via snail mail was a powerful and magnificent form of human communication.
A good letter was an art form. Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce were prolific writers of letters. Ronald Reagan’s collected letters provide the most complete portrait of the man known as “The Great Communicator.” Neal Cassady’s 1950 letter to Jack Kerouac regarding his sexual escapades with a woman named Cherry Mary is one of the pivotal works of the Beat Generation. Kerouac, in his reply to Cassady, called it “among the best things ever written in America.”
Trumbo’s letters are at turns passionate, bitter, and side-splittingly funny. In one, he writes a sarcastic love note to the telephone company that is fleecing him on an installation job. In another, he provides a hilarious discourse to his son on the subject of masturbation. More seriously, there is a letter to his daughter’s school, chastising the principal for allowing his daughter to be rendered a psychologically scarred outcast because of her father’s reputation.
More than anything, the letters reveal the depths to which Trumbo fell during the period of his blacklisting. Once among the most respected screenwriters in Hollywood after his scripts for A Guy Named Joe and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, he was forced to sell his possessions and move his family to Mexico. Unable to find work, they moved back to the States and he began churning out dime a dozen scripts under assumed names for a pittance of a salary.
The most ludicrous moment of the blacklist came in 1956, when the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture Story was awarded to “Robert Rich” for The Brave One. Rich was, of course, a front for Trumbo, who did not officially receive the award until 1975.
The turning point came in 1960, when taboo buster Otto Preminger gave Trumbo proper screen credit for the film Exodus. He also received credit that year for his screenplay for the Kirk Douglas vehicle Spartacus, a film that subtextually comments on the blacklist in the famous “I’m Spartacus!” scene, where hundreds of slaves willingly write their own death sentences by refusing to give up their leader. Douglas, interviewed here, recalls his lobbying to get Trumbo’s name in the credits as one of the proudest moments of his career.
Other victims of the era weren’t as fortunate. Abraham Polonsky, auteur of the brilliant 1948 film noir Force of Evil, did not get another chance to direct until 1969. Alvah Bessie, John Howard Lawson, Samuel Ornitz, and Adrian Scott would never work in Hollywood again.
But perhaps the most tragic exhibit of the debilitating effects of the blacklist is the 1951 film He Ran All the Way, which was co-written by an uncredited Trumbo. The film’s director, John Berry, was blacklisted as a direct result of a documentary about the Hollywood witch hunts titled The Hollywood Ten. He would not work again in the U.S. until the 1970s.
He Ran All the Way would also mark the final screen appearance of John Garfield. He succumbed to a heart attack the following year, a death at least partially caused by the strain of being investigated by HUAC and being cast aside by Hollywood. He was 39.
Trumbo is playing Sunday, March 29 at 11:30 AM at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier as part of the Green Mountain Film Festival. A discussion with Kate Lardner, daughter of Ring Lardner Jr., will follow the screening.
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