There’s no topic dearer to Tinseltown’s heart than the Hollywood 10.
In this fable, a group of writers (and one director) faced persecution at the hands of the United States government for their benign political views. It was a dark time for America; an abdication of the freedoms for which prior generations fought and died.
That’s the story “Trumbo” would have you believe. The documentary, the tale of Dalton Trumbo — the most famous of the writers cited for contempt of Congress during the House Committee on Un-American Activities — is an adaptation of the play by his son, Christopher.
As an artistic work, “Trumbo” is a modest success, telling the story of a man that few people knew as anything other than the answer to a trivia question: “Who was the first screenwriter to break the blacklist?”
Combining archival footage with new interviews and readings from Mr. Trumbo’s letters by such noted actors as Paul Giamatti and Liam Neeson, “Trumbo” does a good job of humanizing the man behind the screenplays for “Spartacus,” “The Brave One,” and countless other classic films.
What it most decidedly does not do, though, is a good job of explaining the realities of the blacklist.
One could be forgiven for thinking that the Trumbo family suffered the risk of starvation as its patriarch nobly refused to do business with the industry that had betrayed him. This is simply not the case: He constantly wrote under pseudonyms, feeding the beast even while condemning its behavior.
The moral implications of that complicity not only go unexamined, they’re never even raised. If the capitulation of the movie industry to the HUAC was really such a moral blight and constitutional disaster, isn’t Mr. Trumbo guilty of assisting the shredding of that document by plying Hollywood with material to put up on the big screen?
In reality, the Hollywood 10 were not merely reputed communists but Stalinists taking the party’s line even as word of atrocities were leaking out of Russia. As Richard Schickel noted in his biography of Elia Kazan (a friendly witness to HUAC and one-time communist himself), “The blacklist was only occasionally a tragedy; mostly it was an inconvenience. And a fairly short-lived one, at that, essentially broken when Dalton Trumbo received credit on ’Spartacus.’ … Compared to the twenty million Soviet Citizens killed by Stalin, the millions more imprisoned in the Gulag, [the 10’s] numbers were paltry, their punishment mild.”
The film also omits that, as America entered into war against Nazi Germany (at that point an enemy of the Communist Party due to Hitler’s invasion of Russia), Mr. Trumbo collaborated with the FBI in tracking down isolationists opposed to entering World War II.
He turned over letters from citizens asking the author to help them track down copies of his antiwar novel “Johnny Got His Gun” (a novel quoted extensively in this documentary). It turns out that Mr. Trumbo named names after all.
It’s no surprise that screenwriters, in particular, love the story of the Hollywood Ten. Everyone wants to be seen as a martyr. Martyrdom without sacrifice, though, is no real accomplishment — and faux martyrdom after hypocritically denouncing a practice previously engaged in is even worse.
★½
TITLE: “Trumbo”
CREDITS: Written by Christopher Trumbo
RATING: PG-13 (sex-related commentary)
RUNNING TIME: 96 minutes
WEB SITE: https://trumbothemovie.com
MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS
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