Write to Remain Silent

Blacklisted scribe Dalton Trumbo finds his way onto the big screen.

by Sam Adams

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Adapting Christopher Trumbo's stage play, Peter Askin's Trumbo pays tribute to blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in his own words — but not the words you'd expect. Rather than quoting from his screenplays, which included Spartacus, Gun Crazy and Lonely Are the Brave, the movie relies largely on private speech, mainly correspondence with his family, friends and the occasional enemy. The effect is not always flattering, nor is it complete, but the movie succeeds in honoring Trumbo's convictions without turning him into a plaster saint.

When he was called in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, Trumbo denounced the proceedings as "the beginning of an American concentration camp." Cited for contempt of Congress (a charge with which, apart from the prison sentence, he wholeheartedly concurred), he spent the next 13 years working under assumed names and through fronts, since the major Hollywood studios had privately agreed not to employ anyone who was, had been, or might be a Communist. (Trumbo was a member of the party for several years, though he was hardly the type to toe the party line.) Two of Trumbo's pseudonyms won Oscars, for Roman Holiday in 1953 and The Brave One in 1957, but he was in no position to collect them.

Although Christopher Trumbo's play was a one-man show, Askin has reconfigured it as an all-star spectacle, with readings by Michael Douglas, Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Paul Giamatti and Nathan Lane, who reads a letter from father to son that enthusiastically endorses self-abuse. More importantly, he adds interviews with Victor Navasky and Kirk Douglas, whose decision to bill Trumbo under his own name for Spartacus is credited with ending the blacklist for good.

Toward the end of his life, Trumbo said that the blacklist produced "no saints or sinners ... only victims." But he emerges from Askin's movie as neither saint nor sinner nor victim, but as an imperfect and often difficult man for whom losing his livelihood was less daunting than losing himself.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Trumbo | Directed by Peter Askin | A Samuel Goldwyn release