‘Trumbo’: Blacklisted writer’s story told with passion

Published 11:01 am Thursday, September 11, 2008

Dalton Trumbo deserves his own movie, and “Trumbo” is it: an impassioned take on a turbulent life. It’s an introduction, but it left me wanting to know more about the man.

The film is inspired by a stage play that relied on Trumbo’s writings read to the audience. That element is maintained here (along with interviews with the man himself), as a number of distinguished actors read from his letters.

A novelist and screenwriter, Trumbo wrote the scathing anti-war novel “Johnny Got His Gun,” which decades later he adapted into a film himself.

In the interval, he became one of Hollywood’s most prized writers, a member of the Communist Party, and then, after World War II, a blacklisted ghost.

Trumbo was one of the “Hollywood Ten,” a group of writers suspected of having Communist affiliations. Some of them had and some of them hadn’t, and being a Communist wasn’t illegal, in any case. But this was the Cold War.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities questioned Trumbo and other Hollywood figures. HUAC’s approach was itself un-American — they essentially trampled on the First Amendment’s guarantee of peaceable assembly.

Trumbo did a year in jail on charges of contempt of Congress. He had refused to cooperate and also refused to name other people who might have been suspected of Communist influence.

Not surprisingly, some of the most stirring letters read in “Trumbo” are those written from his jail cell. In one, he talks of the informers who kept their careers going during the blacklist, describing his thoughts while gazing out across a vast soldiers’ cemetery on Iwo Jima. “In the center of all those graves,” he wrote, “on a slim white pole on a concrete pedestal flew the American flag. And I swear it was not the flag of informers.”

Trumbo’s gift for ringing rhetoric is present in many of the movies he wrote, including “Spartacus” and “Exodus” (the two 1960 films that signaled the end of his exile from credited movie work). He’d been working during the blacklist under assumed names and using “fronts” to represent his scripts.

This led to a tragic-comic episode of Oscar history, recounted here. The winner of the “best story” Oscar in 1956 (for “The Brave One”), Robert Rich, failed to collect his prize at the podium — because it was actually Trumbo, still persona non grata.

These anecdotes come out only in sketchy fashion here. And the actors assembled to read the letters (Donald Sutherland, Joan Allen, Liam Neeson, Kirk Douglas and Michael Douglas, and others), have been encouraged to read in a highly “dramatic” style that frankly overemphasizes Trumbo’s tendency toward grandiloquence. A long letter about masturbation (read by Nathan Lane) suggests the roots of his tendency to fall in love with the sound of his own words.

Great films about the blacklist have yet to be made. But “Trumbo” is an often moving piece of the mosaic.