Word: hollywoodized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...standard line on the Hollywood Ten goes that they decided to forego honor for the first time when they left the East Coast. Some had been active in the Party when they lived in New York, others got involved once they came to Los Angeles. For the most part they were, like Fitzgerald's character Pat Hobby, well-paid and kicked around. Men like Trumbo and Adrian Scott were filled with electric energy when they got to Hollywood to work, but the movies turned almost everything they did to pablum...
...other eight were just unfriendly." Wilder is wrong--they had talent, but they were not company men in a company town. They felt self-conscious in the industry. Moss Hart, the New York playwright, once told Clifford Odets (not one of the Ten but persecuted later) that Odets's Hollywood experience had persuaded many writers to turn left and go west. "You mean," Odets asked eagerly, "my plays convert them?" "No," Hart said, "your salary...
David Halpern's Hollywood On Trial takes a long, diffuse perspective on the Ten and their times, starting with the thirties and moving in little leaps up to the dissolution of the blacklist in the sixties. The footage of the hearings is glorious because, of course, they were staged by the Committee to look like movies. The best actor of all is a young Ronald Reagan who earnestly looks through his clearframed glasses at the Chairman and summons the words of Jefferson to make his point. ("I guess Jefferson..." a humble pause... "said it best...") Gary Cooper shrugs and grins...
Sadly, the repentant friendly witness, Edward Dmytryk, can be watched falling apart; he presents an outlay of all the conflicts playing inside the weak paradigm. Dmytryk stood with Ten, went to jail, came out and gave names; he was subsequently hired by Hollywood's reigning young liberal Stanley Kramer. Now, his pictures and career faded, all he does is apologize and explain with a slight tremble. Trumbo's pictures were no better than Dmytryk's for the most part (his dialogue stank) but he had his integrity and his anger to clutch to, and it kept...
...explain the period, and of course, it does not. It stretches and sprawls and sometimes the interviews just go flat. But it is by far the best work done on the ugly little freak blacklist, and it is hard to imagine anybody attempting to match the ambitious perspective of Hollywood on Trial. It pulls in Herbert Hoover and Zero Mostel. Joseph McCarthy and Walt Disney, and although it doesn't have the footwork some documentaries do, it is an impressive mosaic...