Word: trumbo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Hollywood on Trial, which concerns the HUAC investigations and the subsequent blacklisting of several hundred writers, directors, producers and performers in both movies and television, focuses primarily on the men who went to jail for contempt of Congress. These ten - the group included Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner Jr. and Director Edward Dmytryk - declined, sometimes indignantly, sometimes bemusedly, to answer the persistent questions of the committee chairman concerning their alleged Communist Party affiliations. "I could answer your question," Ring Lardner told the committee, "but I'd hate myself in the morning." Since Communist Party membership was not illegal...
...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...
These men, who had written Pride of the Marines, Objective Burma. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Destination Tokyo had now become the enemy themselves. In the Halpern film, only Dalton Trumbo explains the awful terror that came with the subpoena, the process of "getting ready to become nobody." Halpern shows the progressive effect of pressure and time on the writers. They age, dry up, crease and sag--but those with spirit make their physicality irrelevant. The polar two in the film are Trumbo and Edward Dmytryk...
...Trumbo, obviously dying as the 1975 interviews which interpolate the film were made, nevertheless communicates a self-confidence and circumspection missing from some of the other writers who couldn't rebound the way he did. Successful enough to be generous, Trumbo is able to empathize to the extent that he projects himself back in time: "I had three children. I had a nice wife. Why should I go to jail...
...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 him a man to the end. Alvah Bessie never got another script job again--he stage managed the Hungry in San Francisco...