The Magazine

In Search of Trumbo

You won't find him in The Movie.

Jul 21, 2008, Vol. 13, No. 42 • By RONALD RADOSH
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The late director Billy Wilder, referring to the "Unfriendly Ten"-later called the Hollywood Ten, who refused to answer questions from the House Un-American Activities Committee in its 1950 investigation of Hollywood communism-joked that "only two were talented. The rest were just unfriendly."

One of those two was Dalton Trumbo, arguably the most talented, witty, and sharpest of the writers blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1950s and '60s. Any audience listening to Trumbo's words, read by such well-known actors as Joan Allen, Michael Douglas, Paul Giamatti, Nathan Lane, Liam Neeson, and David Strathairn, among others, will find much evidence of Trumbo's brilliance.

But what they will not find in Trumbo:The Movie, directed by Peter Askin and based on a play by the writer's son Christopher, is an accurate depiction of the personal complexity, private doubts, and life of Dalton Trumbo, who was a devoted Hollywood Communist from the late 1930s through the early '50s. Instead, they will find a repetition of the all-too-familiar narrative about the Hollywood Reds: innocent victims persecuted for their ideas by reactionary, attention-grabbing congressmen. Devoted first and foremost to defense of the First Amendment and the nation's civil liberties, and under attack from McCarthyites, they and Trumbo fought the worst villains of all: the "friendly" ex-Communist writers and actors who did testify and sold their souls for the right to continue working by informing against their old comrades and exposing them as once having been Reds. Thus Trumbo, writes the New York Times, just might "finally put to rest the hunt for good guys and bad."

No, it won't.

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