BEFORE: It occurs to me that this week has really been all about Communism and the Cold War era. From fighting the Communist China-backed troops in "We Were Soldiers" to Bobby Fischer facing Soviet chess players in "Pawn Sacrifice", and even "Arrival" dealt with Communist leaders who were also in contact with the aliens. So, since that's my loose theme for the week, I might as well lean into it with this film about the blacklisting of American Communist screenwriters. And Michael Stuhlbarg carries over from "Arrival" for the last time this year, I think. But I'll see Bryan Cranston again at the end of October's Halloween chain, more about that later. But I'm going to get very sneaky with the linking after this, since I'm counting appearances made via archive footage.
And for the sake of the Halloween chain, which is going to really be two or three little chains sort of "Frankensteined" together, appropriately, I'm going to allow characters, like, umm, Dr. Frankenstein, to carry over between films whenever possible.
THE PLOT: Dalton Trumbo was Hollywood's top screenwriter, until he and other artists were jailed and blacklisted for their political beliefs.
AFTER: I know it seems hard to believe, but there was a time in American political history where Communists were ostracized or even jailed just based on the way that they thought, or if they belonged to a particular political party - which was (and still is) a legal thing to do. These days we don't imprison people who have dealings with Russia, it seems we elect them President now... Yes, we all know that there was a couple of giant countries on the other side of the globe that were also Communist, and those countries were threatening to destroy us at the time, but that still didn't give the U.S. government the right to tell people how to think or what to say. Sure, it's hard to let people speak their mind sometimes, especially in times like now, when some people are spouting racist things or reviving old Nazi ways of thinking, but trying to function like the thought police never really ends well - it's better in the long run to allow people to be wrong, if that's the way that you perceive their ideas, and hope that they will learn the error of their way of thinking in the long run. (The minute that they physically harm someone, or interfere with someone else's rights, though, feel free to point that out...)
Hollywood keeps making movies about the blacklist, or the HUAC or the McCarthy hearings, like "Guilty By Suspicion" and "Good Night, Good Luck" - maybe Hollywood just likes making movies about making movies, and this is a sneaky way to do it and seem politically important. The funny thing about Dalton Trumbo, one of the "Hollywood Ten" screenwriters who were, in fact, members of the American Communist Party (which again, at the time they joined, was a legal thing to be) is that he never really stopped working - after he served 10 months in federal prison he wrote screenplays under other people's names, or phony names, and wrote screenplays for B-movies and maybe even a few C-movies. Finally he landed a gigs writing "Spartacus" for Kirk Douglas and "Exodus" for Otto Preminger and was able, after many years of hustling, to get his name back on the screen.
A couple of Oscar nominations for pseudonyms - people who didn't really exist - probably didn't hurt, and Trumbo's wife and kids stood by him, even though they were forced to answer the phones for several non-existent people and deliver screenplays to the various studios all over Hollywood. Hey, kids, it's good experience, it builds character - you'll appreciate this one day for sure. And I should know, I pretty much started my career in film production by doing deliveries. And then the Academy finally came around and presented Dalton Trumbo with his Oscar for "The Brave One" in 1975.
I found parts of this film to be quite funny, though I don't think it was designed to be a comedy. But some parts showed how ridiculous a process the whole screenwriting / movie-making thing can be, and if you happen to work in that industry, those gags can have twice the impact. All the talk about making schlocky horror films was relevant, too, especially as I'm getting set up to watch a bunch of those in October. Now, I realize that a man going to jail to defend his beliefs is not particularly funny, that's the not the part I'm referring to.
At least this film didn't have too many scenes of a writer staring at a blank page in a typewriter, the way so many of the films about writers seem to do. Writer's block didn't seem to be a problem for Trumbo, if anything he seemed to have the opposite problem, that he had to keep on writing and didn't seem to be able to stop. I didn't really understand why he typed while in the bathtub - I suppose I could see it if someone was such a prolific writer that he had to type all the time, even while bathing, but here it seems like Trumbo used this as part of his process, and I don't see how sitting in a tub of water could help - wouldn't his fingers get all pruney, which would make it harder to type? Wouldn't the paper get all soggy?
Also starring Bryan Cranston (last heard in "Kung Fu Panda 3"), Diane Lane (last seen in "Untraceable"), Helen Mirren (last seen in "Calendar Girls"), John Goodman (last seen in "Patriots Day"), Stephen Root (last heard in "The Fox and the Hound 2"), Alan Tudyk (last heard in "Moana"), Louis C.K. (last heard in "The Secret Life of Pets"), Richard Portnow (last seen in "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"), Roger Bart (last seen in "Last Vegas"), Elle Fanning (last heard in "The Boxtrolls"), Dean O'Gorman (last seen in "The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies"), John Getz (last seen in "Jobs"), David Maldonado (last seen in "The 5th Wave"), Dan Bakkedahl (last seen in "Get Hard"), David James Elliott, Madison Wolfe, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (last seen in "Concussion"), Christian Berkel (last seen in "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."), James Dumont (also last seen in "Patriots Day"), Sean Bridgers (last seen in "Free State of Jones"), J.D. Evermore (last seen in "Deepwater Horizon"), Peter Mackenzie, Mark Harelik, with archive footage of Eddie Albert (last seen in "Hustle"), Lauren Bacall (last heard in "Ernest & Celestine"), Lucille Ball (last seen in "Follow the Fleet"), Humphrey Bogart (last seen in "Dark Victory"), James Garner (last seen in "How Sweet It Is!"), Cary Grant (last seen in "Destination Tokyo"), Audrey Hepburn (last seen in "Two for the Road"), Danny Kaye (last seen in "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"), John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Pawn Sacrifice"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Deborah Kerr (last seen in "Julius Caesar"), Jerry Lewis (last seen in "The Ladies Man"), Laurence Olivier (last seen in "A Bridge Too Far"), Gregory Peck (last seen in "Roman Holiday"), Ronald Reagan, Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, Joseph Stalin, Jean Simmons (last seen in "The Robe"), Woody Strode (last seen in "The Black Stallion Returns"), Dalton Trumbo.
RATING: 6 out of 10 pieces of birthday cake
No comments:
Post a Comment