Film
Trumbo
Cert:(adv PG)
Dir. Peter Asken
USA , 95 mins, 2007
Cast: Documentary with: Kirk Douglas, Dustin Hoffman, Joan Allen, Michael Douglas
The short film The Constant Father will be shown before this film.
The name Dalton Trumbo (1905-76) has become a byword for what he himself called “a time of evil” in modern American history. Trumbo was not the perpetrator; far from it. Instead he was a particularly high-profile victim of the Hollywood blacklist as drawn up by the fascistic House Un-American Activities Committee, which had been set up to uncover Communist propaganda in film.
During the 1940s Trumbo was one of the highest paid screenwriters in Hollywood. His wealth brought him an impressive ranch – a comfortable home in which to raise his family. He was a devoted and passionate family man. He was a success. All that ended when he refused to name names at the HUAC sessions. He and nine other colleagues, all writers and directors, refused to abase themselves before the committee. They became known as ‘the Hollywood Ten’. HUAC delighted in jailing them.
Trumbo, like many of his friends and fellow blacklistees, found a return to normality impossible. He fled to Mexico, hoping to find work in the local industry. It was a disaster. He returned to America a broken man. Desperate and drowning in debt, he churned out a dozen scripts in 18 months using 13 pseudonyms.
His luck changed in 1957 when a script for the bullfighting drama The Brave One landed an Oscar. The story was by one ‘Robert Rich’, but when no-one claimed the award all thoughts turned to Trumbo. He was fully “rehabilitated” when Kirk Douglas requested he write the script for Spartacus and demanded he be given an appropriate screen credit. After ten long years in exile, Trumbo no longer had to hide.
Based on the play by his son, Trumbo is an unsparing look back at a traumatic, chaotic time. The unrepentant Trumbo’s sense of anger and injustice lives on in his letters, which are given voice by a stellar gathering of acting talent that relishes his words. The film also underlines Trumbo’s opinion, forged through economic reprisals and adversity, that when faced with poverty, homelessness and starvation, “freedom of speech becomes a luxury for which few fight at the most.”
Tony Earnshaw
Other films showing that are part of CineFile are:
