Every few years we have occasion to revisit one of American history's most shameful chapters: The witch hunt and blacklist that destroyed countless lives in Hollywood and elsewhere and sent to prison people who committed no crime.
The last public reminder came in 1999 with the honorary Oscar bestowed upon Elia Kazan, the director who famously named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Some applauded at the ceremony. Others, including Ed Harris and Nick Nolte, pointedly refused.
This week brings another reminder in the form of Trumbo, starring Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston as the outspoken blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo was among the most prominent of the Hollywood Ten, a collection of filmmakers who did prison time for refusing to answer questions about the Communist ties of themselves and others when they were called before the committee in 1947.
"They tried to stand on the First Amendment," Cranston said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. "And it just didn't hold."
Trumbo was in fact a member of the U.S. Communist Party, as were many left-leaning artists of the time. As Victor S. Navasky writes in his essential blacklist study Naming Names, many blacklist victims as well as informers "joined the Communist Party out of motives of social conscience at a time when it was in the business of fighting racism and depression at home and fascism abroad."
Trumbo and countless others were essentially imprisoned for refusing to roll over on their friends. As Trumbo sits in prison and listens to a broadcast of his friend Edward G. Robinson naming names, another inmate (a vehement anti-Communist) chimes in: "Snitch like that in here, you end up dead."
Prison has a moral code. HUAC did not. In attempting to root out dangerous behavior, the blacklist ultimately just left a trail of human wreckage.
Trumbo was a fascinating figure on multiple fronts. He was a Communist who loved money. "You talk like a radical," admonishes fellow screenwriter Arlen Hird (a composite character played by Louis C.K.), "but you live like a rich guy." He loved the sound of his own voice, as well as whiskey, cigarettes and writing in the bathtub. When he got out of prison he wrote under a series of fake names, or fronts, one of which won an Oscar (Robert Rich, for The Brave One). Trumbo also played a major part in ending the blacklist when Otto Preminger (Exodus) and then Kirk Douglas (Spartacus) insisted on listing his name for his scripts.
And he argued for free speech as he argued most other things: ferociously. "You can boil it all down to the idea that we both have the right to be wrong," Cranston says. "It's not about trying to convince somebody else of your ideology. It's just about being able to have it."
Other movies have dealt with the shame of the blacklist, including 1976's The Front. Woody Allen plays a cashier who agrees to front for a group of blacklisted screenwriters, then gets called to testify. The film's writer (Walter Bernstein) and director (Martin Ritt), and several cast members (including Zero Mostel and Herschel Bernardi), were former blacklist victims.
To hear Trumbo tell it, everyone involved was a victim, informers included. The film takes the time to consider the dilemma of those who snitched, specifically Robinson (played by Michael Stuhlbarg), who reminds Trumbo that actors can't hide behind fronts. They have only their own faces.
Trumbo concludes with a 1970 speech Trumbo gave to the Screen Writers Guild that proved controversial in its own right. "The blacklist was a time of evil," he says from the stage, "and no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil ... none of us -- left, right or center -- emerged from that long nightmare without sin." This sentiment rubbed some blacklist victims the wrong way, especially Trumbo's fellow Hollywood Ten member Albert Maltz, who couldn't stomach the idea of considering his persecutors victims.
"I look at Eddie Robinson and Elia Kazan and the other people that did cooperate with HUAC and I know they were under immense pressure," Cranston says. "And I ask myself: What would I do? I hope I'd be honorable and try to say it's none of your business what unions I belong to and what political parties I belong to and who I voted for."
The blacklist emerged from a time when it was all too easy to to hurl the "You're not American enough" accusation. That's a dangerous game that still gets played whenever there's a war to be sold or a presidential election to be decided.
Trumbo is an entertaining history lesson. It's also a cautionary tale worth heeding.
