The Dalton Trumbo Story

 TRUMBO

Trumbo - Cranston & Mirren.

 

 

   Now, curiously, the heroes of my distant youth are coming back as characters in movies - John Houseman and George Coulouris in Orson Welles & Me, Orry George Kelly in Women He’s Undressed, a couple of 2012 Alfred Hitchcocks (Hitchcock & The Girl)  and even Sam Wood (fleetingly) in Trumbo.

Actually Sam Wood was a more significant figure and a more interesting story than Dalton Trumbo but getting into that would require a talent more substantial than the new movie’s Jay Roach, director of Meet the Parents and the Austin Powers movies. That’s full bore Sidney Lumet material.

Trumbo shows Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo back from a stint as WW2 correspondent signing an MGM contract that made him the best paid writer in the world. However the Cold War gives leftists public enemy status and he becomes one of the “Hollywood Ten” sent to jail when they tried to use their First Amendment freedom of speech rights as a shield against the attacks of the House Un-American Activities Committee. The fifth amendment doesn’t get a look in in this movie.

Cranston & Roach

The film has a total disinterest in accuracy. It kicks off in black & white with Edward G. Robinson about to fill a stoolie with lead under Sam Wood’s direction, while writer Dalton Trumbo is hovering on the set. Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, the film Trumbo wrote for Robinson was a weepy and the 1939 modern girl drama Kitty Foyle was the only recorded time Wood and Trumbo worked together.

The Trumbos didn’t retreat to suburbia with a fink neighbor. They settled in Mexico City. Dalton Trumbo was working for the King Brothers long before 1953’s Roman Holiday though it would be nice to think that Frank King did see off the man from the IATSE by waving a baseball bat. The most off-putting material is in the depiction of Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg excellent again) disturbing for the things it misrepresents. The star has been composited with people like Sterling Hayden and Lee J. Cobb to the historical figure’s discredit, though Stuhlbarg does get the film’s best line, offering to sell another painting to fund bribing the jury.

All this information is easily found and the makers of Trumbo must have had it and chosen to play footsie with the facts because they thought that would make what they were doing more involving or more relevant. Their story was the iniquity of the Hollywood black list.

Most unsettling is the film’s handling of Bryan Cranston’s Dalton Trumbo himself. Inexplicably they sideline “Johnny Got His Gun”, Trumbo’s pacifist signature work as book, play and finally the self directed 1971 movie which all the friends I shipped off to watch, in its one week, one theater London release, wanted to go back and see again. That comes with the film’s side step on the acceptance and rejection of Moscow directives, which had the real Dalton Trumbo suppressing that text at one stage.

Well it’s only a movie, Ingrid.

Cranston in Trumbo

They do have Trumbo’s swimming pool socialist coming up against the reality of Adewale Akinnioye Akbaje’s jailed black murderer. However the film’s one fully shaded character is Helen Mirren as the odious Hedda Hopper. Her authoritative defiance and decline is an arc that balances Trumbo’s triumph in a way that is more striking than what is going on around it. I wonder whether the actress had any input into the scripting. It makes an intriguing comparison with Ilka Chase’s rendition of Clifford Odets’ version of Hopper in the Robert Aldrich film of Odets’ The Big Knife.  There are a couple of TV adaptations of that one too.

It is nice to see Cranston’s Trumbo playing the giant egos of Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger off against one another, though people like Stanley Kramer and Edward Lewis miss out any nod for their work in breaking the Hollywood blacklist. The committee screwed up big time. They wanted to have celebrity subjects to get publicity for their accusation and they are the reason people are still deriding their blunders.

The film making is undistinguished, with just the odd flourish like Diane Lane meeting Cranston at night on his release from the Kentucky prison. Technically the integration of new footage into HUAC news coverage or Spartacus is impeccable. Performances are good enough and occasionally, as with Louis C.K., Mirren and Stuhlbarg, better than that.

Dalton Trumbo in the bath

 They have a go at the creative process with Cranston doing liquor and pills with a typewriter in the bath to sustain the killing output of black market scenarios stuck together with scotch tape.

Cranston’s reconciliation with Elle Fanning is genuinely touching and his watching TV surrounded by the family who have suffered with him, when his name is read out at the Oscars is rousing.  Roach’s ambition to extend his range pays off. He does ultimately turn the notion that the Red Scares of the fifties were a battle between freedom of expression and dim witted right wing bigots into Twenty First Century multiplex entertainment.

We do however have more penetrating accounts of the events of the blacklist from writers who lived through it - Arthur Miller’s essay on Elia Kazan’s participation, Walter Bernstein’s script for The Font and Trumbo’s own take on it, represented here by Cranston delivering his great Writer’s Guild acceptance speech  (“no heroes and villains - only victims”) nicely prefaced by the uncredited Ring Lardner jr. introduction. It was Lardner who met the chairman of the HUAC committee in jail and, rather that zap him with a sharp one liner, they didn't speak.

Kitty Foyle, Roman Holiday, Spartacus, Lonely Are the Brave, along with Gordon Wiles’ The Gangster, the Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy and Terror in a Texas Town and his own Johnny Got His Gun - Trumbo’s is a formidable body of work. 

There are so many other narratives that beg to be explored here - the left’s disenchantment with the Moscow line, the relation between ideology and serious (or indeed frivolous) art. How come films which Dalton Trumbo wrote for cheap jack production are so much better than multi million dollar spectaculars like A Guy Named Joe, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo and Hawaii made from his scripts?

Well we had two Hitchcocks, two  Truman Capotes. How about another Dalton Trumbo?

Barrie Pattison