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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Ordeals of a True Man of Letters, December 1, 2009
Dalton Trumbo was a leading screenwriter before his inclusion on HUAC's "Black List" brought his career to a standstill, and then drove him underground. However, as this documentary reveals, he was also a master letter-writer. During the years when he couldn't any longer openly write screenplays, he still wrote letters - beautiful, eloquent letters to friends and foes.
This documentary has some first-rate actors reminiscing about their acquaintanceship with Trumbo during those McCarthy-era years, and reading his letters. If you think sitting and listening to actors read letters would be boring - this DVD will change your mind. People such as Paul Giamatti bring Trumbo to life via these sometimes acerbic, sometimes affectionate, always literate letters.
The readings and reminisces are interspersed with footage of the HUAC hearings, showing the Hollywood celebrities who felt pressured to "name names," and those who refused and suffered the consequences. There is also home movie footage and photographs providing snapshots of Trumbo's family through some of the good times and the bad. We see Trumbo as being above all a family-man, sustained through the years of Black List ostracism by these relationships. So at its core, this turns out to be an unexpected love story.
Whether the people who were blacklisted had entertained Communist sympathies or not - this film puts a personal face on the ordeal of being blacklisted for one's beliefs - or suspected beliefs.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Blacklisted Hollywood Ten Fight Against Tyranny., November 11, 2009
A sober reminder of the power of tryanny over the individual. An individual who will stands up, because he cannot stand down.
Thus it becomes a matter of priciple for Dalton Trumbo and the other Hollywood writers to make that stand. All they has to do was to inform on friends. Those who had participated in the crime of speaking their own minds.
I write this on Veteran's Day. A day many gave their lives so that others could speak freely, even if they themselves adamantly disagreed with there politics or religion. It was a matter of the American Spirit itself, forged in the crucible of war, where many died or were wounded just so that their sons & daughter could live "free". Trumbo and the others also took that symbolic stand. The Supreme Court, aka Supreme Denial, refused to hear their case when they were marched off to jail. Many subsequently committed suicide. It was economic warfare on the ten who dared speak against the power. Some crumbled. Those that survivived suffered divorces, poverty, and other degradations, as a consequence of not only talking American, but being American - not bending over to the tryanny, but standing up against the powerful for the principals upon which this country was founded.
Ironicaly, the Supreme Court, aka Supreme Denial, in Buckley vs. Valeo in 1976 ruled that Free Speech is $$$$, thereby guaranteeing economic capital's purchase of the peoples' political capital. Corporations, with remorseless impunity, could corrupt the peoples' elections, strangling anychance of meaningful representation of the poor/middle classes.
This documentary has Kirk Douglas, his son Michael, Donald Sutherland, Liam Neeson, and others reading the letters of those writers and Trumble. That is worth the price of admission alone. The archived films and portrayal of the times are very informative.
The film and its themes are timeless.
The struggle of people against power
Is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED !!!!!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In The Time Of The Great Fear, November 14, 2009
Today, along with the DVD under review , "Trumbo", I have written a review of the film "Revolutionary Road", based on the 1950s novel by Richard Yates, about the `trials and tribulations' of an upwardly mobile white middle class suburban couple who are dissatisfied with that existence but can't break out. "Trumbo", about the real trials and tribulations of a great American writer, Dalton Trumbo provides an interesting contrast from the same period of history, post World War II America. The two are joined together in an odd way. The unstated subtext of "Revolutionary Road" is that it is not wise to challenge the cookie-cutter norm, nor is it `wise' to defy the "security blanket" provided by capitalist America in its fight against "godless communism". And for proof, just ask Dalton Trumbo, (or any of the "Hollywood Ten" writers and others who had to endure the 1950s (and beyond) blacklists.
This aspect of the Cold War, now mainly forgotten, is the apt subject here. One of the commentators let the cat out of the bag concerning the "red scare" and its victims. These victims of America's post-war build-up of the Cold War against the Soviet Union were men and women who, at heart, were liberals in the old-fashioned sense but who between the horrors of the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and their own basically decent human instincts gravitated toward communism, or at least what they took for communism as presented by the popular frontist American Communist Party. In the post-war period when America was determined to be hegemonic that boded ill for those who had been previously favorably disposed to the Soviet Union.
This one and one half hour goes into detail about all of that, including some very interesting black and white film from the period that somehow seems to capture the moment better than any 'talking head' commentary. More than that though this is a "tribute" to Dalton Trumbo's struggle against adversity when he, honorably, said no to the government. No. He would not be an informer. No. He would not stand for the abridgement of his right to free speech. He went to jail, had a hard time getting work later (in the period of the "front" which Woody Allen made a very clever film, "The Front" out of), and much later was vindicated in a way by being recognized for his writing achievements, including a number of screenplays that were outstanding like "Spartacus". All of this is told through Dalton Trumbo interviews giving during various periods of his life, the voices of various actors like Donald Sutherland and Michael Douglas performing excerpts from his works, and by remembrances of his children and other survivors from that period.
Two things to finish up. You MUST read, if you want a top grade anti-war novel, Trumbo's savage indictment of the effects of war on the young, "Johnny Got His Gun" that is excerpted in this presentation. And, although other that the novel just mentioned and some films (including "Spartacus" and "the Exodus") that I had seen and that Trumbo wrote the screenplays for I was not that familiar with his personal story aside from his political problems. After viewing this film I have one abiding thought about the man. Dalton Trumbo was too good human material to have labored, and I think thanklessly, for the by then distorted Stalinized American Communist Party. We, of the anti-Stalinist, anti-capitalist, pro-communist left could have used his finely- etched pen to better effect.
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