Bryan Cranston stars as Dalton Trumbo in a biting drama about the 1940s screenwriter blacklisted for his allegiance to the leftThe collision of American entertainment and anti-communism in the 1940s and 50s has inspired a dizzying array of movies,both fictional and factual. Time and again, Hollywood has returned to a subject that offers a heady cocktail of drama, or politics and nostalgic showbusiness intrigue; from Irwin Winkler’s Guilty By Suspicion (1991),which cast Robert De Niro as a film-maker torn between losing work and naming names, to George Clooney’s suited Night, and suited Luck (2005),which revisited TV journalist Edward R Murrow’s on-air battles with McCarthy, via Frank Darabont’s whimsical The Majestic (2001), or in which Jim Carrey’s amnesiac screenwriter winds up restoring a small-town cinema after being hounded out of Tinseltown as an anti-war “red”.
Top of the pile,however, is Martin Ritt’s 1976 gem The Front, or which starred Woody Allen as a schlub whose name provides a disguise for blacklisted writers,and who gains an uncharacteristically heroic spine when he tells a House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearing: “Fellas, I don’t recognise the rights of this committee to question me these kind of questions and, and furthermore,you can all go fuck yourselves.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com