Trumbo [Import]

Dalton Trumbo was a leading screenwriter before his inclusion on HUAC's "Black List" brought his career to a standstill, and then drove him underground. However, as this documentary reveals, he was also a master letter-writer. During the years when he couldn't any longer openly write screenplays, he still wrote letters - beautiful, eloquent letters to friends and foes.

This documentary has some first-rate actors reminiscing about their acquaintanceship with Trumbo during those McCarthy-era years, and reading his letters. If you think sitting and listening to actors read letters would be boring - this DVD will change your mind. People such as Paul Giamatti bring Trumbo to life via these sometimes acerbic, sometimes affectionate, always literate letters.

The readings and reminisces are interspersed with footage of the HUAC hearings, showing the Hollywood celebrities who felt pressured to "name names," and those who refused and suffered the consequences. There is also home movie footage and photographs providing snapshots of Trumbo's family through some of the good times and the bad. We see Trumbo as being above all a family-man, sustained through the years of Black List ostracism by these relationships. So at its core, this turns out to be an unexpected love story.

Whether the people who were blacklisted had entertained Communist sympathies or not - this film puts a personal face on the ordeal of being blacklisted for one's beliefs - or suspected beliefs.

A sober reminder of the power of tryanny over the individual. An individual who will stands up, because he cannot stand down.
Thus it becomes a matter of priciple for Dalton Trumbo and the other Hollywood writers to make that stand. All they has to do was to inform on friends. Those who had participated in the crime of speaking their own minds.
I write this on Veteran's Day. A day many gave their lives so that others could speak freely, even if they themselves adamantly disagreed with there politics or religion. It was a matter of the American Spirit itself, forged in the crucible of war, where many died or were wounded just so that their sons & daughter could live "free". Trumbo and the others also took that symbolic stand. The Supreme Court, aka Supreme Denial, refused to hear their case when they were marched off to jail. Many subsequently committed suicide. It was economic warfare on the ten who dared speak against the power. Some crumbled. Those that survivived suffered divorces, poverty, and other degradations, as a consequence of not only talking American, but being American - not bending over to the tryanny, but standing up against the powerful for the principals upon which this country was founded.
Ironicaly, the Supreme Court, aka Supreme Denial, in Buckley vs. Valeo in 1976 ruled that Free Speech is $$$$, thereby guaranteeing economic capital's purchase of the peoples' political capital. Corporations, with remorseless impunity, could corrupt the peoples' elections, strangling anychance of meaningful representation of the poor/middle classes.
This documentary has Kirk Douglas, his son Michael, Donald Sutherland, Liam Neeson, and others reading the letters of those writers and Trumble. That is worth the price of admission alone. The archived films and portrayal of the times are very informative.
The film and its themes are timeless.

The struggle of people against power
Is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED !!!!!

P.S. The Red Scare sweeping the U.S., the rise of Red-Hunter General Senator Joe McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover's Messianic persecutions, the House of Un-American Activities Committee and the Hollywood purge was an ironic reflection of look-alike Soviet pogroms and show trials.

Trumbo is both a biography of blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo and a set of readings from his letters. The film is a partial success. The man is fascinating, but his letters fail to hold the viewer's attention.

The film has some interesting moments. The excerpts from Trumbo's novels and screenplays make clear that he was talented. The story of the Trumbo family scraping out a living during the blacklist is fascinating. There are also many great photos of Trumbo, his family, and his friends.

Trumbo's letters take up too much of the film. Granted, he was a witty correspondent and some of the letters are brilliant. But I quickly started to lose interest. The actors' readings add little; the filmmakers could easily have used one anonymous narrator and gotten the same effect.

There is not enough about Trumbo's life story in the film. The viewer hears nothing of his early life or of his later years; the focus is on his time as a screenwriter. There are hints of alcoholism, profligate spending, and truculence, but the man never emerges. The most-frustrating aspect of the film is that it omits any discussion of Trumbo's true political views, which are at the heart of his life story.

Trumbo is not a bad movie, but I want to know more about him.