by Peter Callaghan

“I’m in this for the money and the pussy and they’re both falling off the trees.” No, not Mary Berry on judging The Great British Bake Off, but pinball salesman-cum-movie mogul Frank King (John Goodman) about making a quick buck in the business known as show. Producer of trashy hits such as Killer In The Swamp in which the best character is the swamp and with a business plan based on quantity over quality which “needs scripts like an army needs toilet paper”, who better to turn to than the prolific Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (Bryan Cranston) who penned the Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn classic Roman Holiday.

But Houston, or rather Hollywood, we have a problem. A pinko problem! Dubbed a “swimming pool Soviet” by actor Edward G. Robinson (Michael Stuhlbarg) on account of his support for industrial action by set builders and pilloried as a “commie” and a “traitor” by members of The Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideas which included luminaries such as John Wayne (David James Elliott) and the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Helen Mirren), Trumbo was blacklisted and later jailed for refusing to cooperate with an investigation into whether he or other American screenwriters had planted Communist propaganda into their movies.

Donald TrumboUnperturbed, King hires Trumbo for $1200 a script. “We bought a gorilla suit,” he tells him. “We got to use it.” And through a series of nom de plumes and front writers, he churns out a series of hugely popular and instantly forgettable b-movies until a-listers Kirk Douglas (Dean O’Gorman) and Austrian director Otto Preminger (Christian Berkel) come a-calling and ask him to work on their respective projects: Spartacus and Exodus. JFK gives him the thumbs up, another Oscar follows suit and the rest as they say is history. But, as he reminds us during his Laurel Award acceptance speech to the Writers Guild of America, “the blacklist was a time of evil”. Scores of people lost their homes, their families and in some cases their lives.

Director Jay Roach and screenwriter John McNamara cram thirty years of backstabbing and politics into just over two hours and in so doing sacrifice substance for satire. But the quality of the performances, particularly from the Oscar-nominated Cranston and the baseball bat-wielding Goodman, are excellent. The one-liners fizz like an Alka-Seltzer, more often than nought at the expense of The Duke who is chastised for his lack of involvement during the Second World War: “You were stationed on a film set, shooting blanks, wearing make-up.” And the overriding message is one of understanding, not blame. There were no heroes or villains, just victims. None more so than Trumbo himself who despite suffering at the hands of the House of Un-American Activities Committee went on to rack up a brace of Academy Awards.

[imdb id=”tt3203606″]

Peter Callaghan
Latest posts by Peter Callaghan (see all)