This Commie plot’s a hit
How a star writer fought back from being blacklisted as a Communist to make some of the greatest films in history
Hollywood, like its stars, has always enjoyed gazing in the mirror. Movies about the movie industry are almost as old as Tinseltown itself. But here’s a story really worth telling: that of dalton Trumbo, the illustrious screenwriter who was blacklisted during the Communist witch-hunts of the late Forties and Fifties.
Bryan Cranston, still best-known as walter white in the TV drama Breaking Bad, is immensely engaging in the title role, and fully deserves his Academy Award nomination. It is a peach of a performance in a peach of a part.
For Trumbo was the world’s highest-paid screenwriter before falling victim to rising paranoia about the perceived ‘Red Menace’, whipped up in washington dC by Senator Joe McCarthy, and in Hollywood by the likes of Hedda Hopper, the powerful, ultraTRuMBo’S conservative gossip columnist (played with thunderous charisma by Helen Mirren).
left-wing credentials were not imagined, however. He really was a member of the Communist Party, and a classic example of what would now be called a Bollinger Bolshevik and was then labelled ‘a swimming-pool Soviet’.
That his Communist sympathies had been hatched in response to the rise of fascism cut no ice with the FBI. And when Trumbo stood up to the now-notorious House unAmerican Activities Committee (HuAC), he was sent to jail.
After his jail term, Trumbo, like the other writers on the blacklist — the so-called Hollywood Ten — lived as a pariah, unable to append his name to screenplays.
His Academy Awards for Roman Holiday (1953) and The Brave one (1956) were won secretly, the first by allowing another writer to take the credit, the second under the pseudonym Robert Rich. Jay Roach’s film tells this fascinating story with elan and humour, if, at times, far too simplistically.
Trumbo is such a paragon of non- stop wit and wisdom that even his more radical friend Arlen Hird (played by the comedian louis C. K., and a composite of several real people) observes: ‘do you have to say everything like it’s going to be chiselled into a rock?’ The great screenwriter himself, I f eel, might have produced a subtler screenplay than John McNamara’s, which portrays all those genuinely terrified by the spectre of Communism, and alarmed by what they considered to be the very real prospect of its pernicious message being disseminated by movies, as either pusillanimously dim or poisonously horrid.
John wayne ( david James elliott), the president of the
admittedly absurd- sounding Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, exemplifies the former camp, Hedda Hopper the latter. When she forces Jewish studio head Louis B. Mayer ( Richard Portnow) to f i re Trumbo, Hopper r eveals herself as a vicious anti-Semite.
Mor e ordinary antiCommunists throw Coke in Trumbo’s face, and dead fish i n his swimming pool. Of decent, honourable folk worried about ‘ the enemy within’ there is no sign. Still, there is welcome ambiguity in the characterisation of other real-life players in this tale.
Actor Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg) is, at first, a staunch ally of Trumbo’s, but later, unable to find work, denounces him before the HUAC.
And Trumbo himself, though a devoted family man, becomes increasingly difficult to live with, all but ignoring his loyal wife (nicely played by Diane Lane) and children (one of whom, Nikola, was a consultant on this film) as he writes frantically, mostly in his favoured workplace, the bathtub.
That he has so much work is mostly down to Frank King (a glorious, larger-thanlife performance by John Goodman), who with his brother produces schlocky B-movies with titles such as The Alien And The Farmgirl and refuses to be intimidated by the McCarthyites.
The Kings ‘need scripts like an army needs toilet paper’. So Trumbo organises a team of blacklisted writers, all deemed unemployable, yet all busily employed.
Gradually, Trumbo himself starts getting more mainstream work. To Hopper’s fury, Kirk Douglas (Dean O’Gorman) hires him to write Spartacus. When Otto Pre minger (Christian Berkel) restores his name to the credits on Exodus, the blacklist is effectively torn up.
It’s a rousing tale, and just the kind of exercise in selfscrutiny that movie folk adore. After all, even in condemning some of its great names of the past, Hollywood emerges as heroically liberal now.
And while a great story and a great performance do not quite add up to a great film, it’s nice to think of old Trumbo in his celestial bathtub, savouring the irony of that Best Actor nomination.