Dalton Trumbo was a first-rate reporter, brilliant screenwriter, and controversial novelist and essayist. By 1944, due to the success of the Oscar-winning Ginger Rogers vehicle KITTY FOYLE and a string of other hits, he was the highest-paid writer in Hollywood, effectively making him the highest-paid writer in the world. He was also a passionate, outspoken Communist, a card-carrying member of the CPUSA. This seeming contradiction is at the heart of TRUMBO, a sympathetic mixture of fact and fiction from director Jay Roach (the Austin Powers tribology and Dinner for Schmucks) and screenwriter John McNamara (a television writer and producer).

The House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) had been constituted in the late 1930s to ferret out Nazi sympathizers, and was involved with the interment of Japanese-American citizens during the war. It did not kick into high gear, however, until it became a full-fledged Standing Committee of House of Representatives in 1945. Its appointed chair, the staunchly conservative, anti-Red Republican J. Parnell Thomas (played by James DuMont in the film) determined the best way to increase HUAC’s public profile was to go after so-called communist sympathizers in Hollywood. (Today, people tend to conflate HUAC’s hearings with the better-known McCarthy witch-hunts, which came six years later in 1953 and were a Senate, not House, initiative.)

Opposition to the HUAC hearings came from the traditional Hollywood liberals, which then included such luminaries as Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Prior to the D-Day landings in the summer of 1944, there had been a pro-Russian element in America calling for a second front to relieve the Russians from the ghastly slaughter they were suffering through courtesy of Hitler’s armies and air force. Yet it took only 12 months after the war ended for Winston Churchill to give his famous “iron curtain” speech, and Russian sympathizers overnight became dangerous post-war Commie agents out to destroy the American way of life.

John Goodman chews the furniture and steals every scene he is in…

In this rising tide of hysteria, Trumbo and eight fellow novelists, screenwriters, and one director (Canadian-born Edward Dymtryk), were paraded before HUAC in the full public glare of newsreel lights and grilled about their loyalty to America with the infamous question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party, yes or no?” Most took the Fifth against self-incrimination, while Trumbo was combative, calling the members of the committee in his own inimitable condescending way “morons” and “fools”. All 10 were convicted of contempt of Congress, and given sentences ranging from six to 18 moths. An eleventh writer, the famous German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who was working in Hollywood at the time, was also hauled before HUAC but fled to East Germany before he could be convicted. In a perfect touch of irony, J. Parnell Thomas was shortly thereafter convicted of corruption and served nine months with two of the Hollywood Ten, but not in the same prison as Dalton Trumbo, as shown in the film.

TRUMBO covers the years from the first time the FBI show up on his doorstep to his vindication at the 1975 Academy Awards, where he is presented with an Oscar for THE BRAVE ONE with his real name engraved on it. He died a year later, in 1976. Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) plays the difficult, prickly writer – the sort of man who knows he’s the smartest guy in the room and doesn’t tolerate fools lightly – with aplomb, wit, nuance and style. He is well deserved of his Oscar, Golden Globes and BAFTA nominations for Best Actor.

Unfortunately, the rest of the cast around him is not flushed out with such subtlety. Diane Ladd’s role as his devoted wife is severely unwritten. His three children, with the exception of the eldest (played nicely by Elle Fanning, younger sister of Dakota), are one-dimensional, which is unfortunate given how much screen time is given
over to his family life. John Goodman chews the furniture and steals every scene he is in as Frank King, king of the B-movies who hires Trumbo when no one else will after he gets out of jail. Under an arrangement with King Brothers Productions, Trumbo employs other blacklisted writers with cash under the table, and turns his family into a mini-script mill, churning out some 30 screenplays and stories over a period of 13 years using “fronts” (various writer friends willing to put their names on his scripts) or pseudonyms.

ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953, Audrey Hepburn’s first major screen role that earned her an Oscar), which he co-wrote with John Dighton using Ian McLellan Hunter as his front, and THE BRAVE ONE (1956), which he wrote under the name Richard Rich (a combination of names of the producer’s relatives) both won Oscars. Yet Trumbo is reduced to watching the ceremonies on the family couch in front of a television, as his screenplay comes up a winner. There’s surprisingly little mention, during this period, of Joseph H. Lewis’s GUN CRAZY: a classic low-budget crime drama that Trumbo wrote (using Millard Kaufman as his front) based on a story by MacKinlay Kantor. It is now considered a landmark film, and was a huge influence on Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking BREATHLESS and Arthur Penn’s BONNIE AND CLYDE. The famous poster for the film, however, does show up in the film’s funniest scene as Goodman goes ballistic and does his best, deranged baseball-bat routine from THE BIG LEBOWSKI. With bat in hand, he chases a stooge for gossip columnist Hedda Hooper – who threatens to ruin the King Brothers unless they fire Trumbo immediately – around the office and out the door, busting up the place.

The film falls short as a portrait of this complex man…

Helen Mirren is outstanding in her role as Hollywood’s most famous Queen Bee, a poisonous bitch out to expose every Commie and disloyal Jew in Hollywood unless they dance to her tune, but her companion in this nasty campaign, the actor John Wayne (David James Elliott), is a portrayed as a one-dimensional right-wing dunce. Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg) comes off better as Trumbo’s cultured and loyal friend who sells some of his extensive art collection to fund Trumbo’s legal troubles, but is conflicted when he is dragged before HUAC no less than four times. He finally has to admit to knowing Communists, some of whom were, indeed, his close friends. The film implies Robinson broke down under pressure and named names, but in fact he didn’t, not even to confirm the original 10. This, nevertheless, causes an irreversible breakdown of their friendship, and Stuhlbarg gives truth to
the pain this causes the great actor.

A large part of the conflict expressed in this notion of a wealthy, successful land-owning artist and intellectual at odds with his political beliefs comes in the form of Arlen Hird (Louis C.K. in a fine dramatic turn), a composite character meant to represent the other nine. He’s the one to point out to Trumbo that he might think he
is a righteous outsider fighting the good fight, but in reality he is an insider who owns a farm with acres of property, has a pretty, devoted wife and three perfect kids and enough money to ride out the Blacklist (which, despite setbacks, he ultimately does), while he has contracted lung cancer, his wife has left him and he can no
longer make a living as a writer.

It seems the rights Dalton Trumbo so judiciously fought for are a never-ending struggle…

Hird is a stand-in for all those whose careers and lives are destroyed due not only to the official Blacklist – imposed by cowered studio executives willing to bend over backwards to co-operate with Congress (most of them being first-generation Eastern European Jews with vivid memories of Russian pogroms and vicious anti-Semitism) and not HUAC – but also the so-called “grey list” of more than 300 actors, union crafts people, writers and directors who are denied work due to their supposed affiliation with known Communists. Eventually the Blacklist is broken dramatically in 1960 when actor/producer Kirk Douglas (Dean O’Gorman, a striking look-alike) publicly announces that Trumbo will be writing the screenplay for his next star vehicle, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, and Austrian-born producer/director Otto Preminger (Christian Berkel) hires him to write Exodus, starring Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint. The Trumbo in TRUMBO is portrayed as a sainted martyr of the American left, but the film falls short as an inclusive portrait of this complex man. It blithely glosses over the fact that the Stalinist regime he defends so vigorously turns out to be a genocidal dictatorship ruled by one of the bloodiest tyrants of the 20th century.

Despite the fact that the film may be inconsequential in places, and written by a B-list writer who fails to measure up to the work of an A-list icon, any reminder of the past and its impact on the future is welcome. And timely. Once again inflammatory, irresponsible American politicians have taken to the airwaves to stoke up fear of the “other” with warnings of a bloodthirsty, fanatical Muslim horde just waiting to invade and destroy America. It seems the rights Dalton Trumbo so judiciously fought for are a never-ending struggle.

GUN CRAZY was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” In 1998, and Trumbo’s writing credit was formally recognized. In addition, his name was officially added to credits of ROMAN HOLIDAY in 2011.

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