Trumbo.

"Revered screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (1905 - 1976) is the most famous of the Hollywood Ten - the Tinseltown scapegoats blacklisted in 1947 after refusing to name names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities - probably because his own life sounds like a movie he scripted," writes Benjamin Strong, reviewing Trumbo in the L Magazine.

"The readings of Dalton Trumbo's letters to family and friends are starkly rendered—famous faces (Michael Douglas, Nathan Lane, Donald Sutherland, Liam Neeson, David Strathairn, Joan Allen, so forth) recite rousing missives without the aid of sets or props of any kind save for Trumbo's own thunderous proclamations in defense of free speech," writes Robert Wilonsky in the Voice.

Updated through 6/27.

"Trumbo's trials are perfect for these actors to display some serious in-house outrage at the evils of Hollywood past, and Douglas and company seem more interested in being cinematically enshrined for their stance on events now ensconced in the hindsighted past than in giving sincere interpretations of Trumbo's outraged, bitter, and political voice," writes Michael Joshua Rowin at indieWIRE. Even so: "Through interviews with biographers, family, and friends like Otto Preminger and Kirk Douglas, Trumbo emerges as an unflappably strong-willed "contrarian" who took what the reactionary paranoia of his time dealt him and more than survived."

"Ultimately, Trumbo is well worth seeing for what it tells us about the age in which this irrepressible individualist lived, loved, suffered and finally triumphed," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer. "Indeed, his hilarious letter to his son, Chris - in college at the time - on the pleasures, glories and guilts of masturbation is alone worth the price of admission. Whatever reservations I have about Trumbo can be attributed to my liberal anti-communist mind-set, which demands that the whole tangled story of the cold war be told."

"Trumbo is most focused when it lets the man and his peers testify directly; actress-writer Jean Rouverol, now past 90, is positively giddy in telling each impassioned war story, as of the night she turned two federal agents away from her door and then phoned her husband and collaborator to warn, 'Get on your horse,'" writes Bill Weber in Slant.

Earlier: Reviews from Toronto.

Update, 6/26: "The real target of the Red Scare was not the handful of prominent lefties like Trumbo who had their livelihoods destroyed and their reputations ruined but rather the rest of society, which proved by and large to be craven, suggestible, and downright eager to hew to a new standard of patriotic conformity," writes Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Whether this was accidental or intentional, pursuing a highly unpopular minority provided authoritarian elements in this country with a test case: How far could constitutional rights and liberties be eroded by government-sponsored fear-mongering? The answer was pretty far, and would-be dictators from J Edgar Hoover to Dick Cheney have been renovating and repeating the pattern ever since, with a different half-imaginary enemy in the gunsight."

And then there's Armond White in the New York Press: "Myth and piety are the film's guiding principles - documenting truth isn't."

Updates, 6/27: "If the story of the Hollywood blacklist and the lives it destroyed has been told many times before, it still bears repeating, especially in the post-9/11 climate of fearmongering, of Guantánamo, of flag pins as gauges of patriotism," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Today few would dispute Trumbo's assessment of that very dark period: 'The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one who survived it on either side came through untouched by evil.'"

"Trumbo clearly proves that, if nothing else, its subject endured the deprivations of the blacklist with more wit than any of the rest of the writers in the original Hollywood Ten," writes Bruce Bennett in the New York Sun. "After watching Trumbo, one suspects that no matter when he was born, Trumbo's flair for agitprop and almost compulsive iconoclasm would have brought him into conflict with the prevailing politics of any era."

"Trumbo's ornery genius couldn't be contained by the screen or the pages of a book; it spilled into every aspect of his life," writes Nathan Rabin at the AV Club. "Trumbo emerges as a son's bittersweet valentine to his old man, and a tribute to the senior Trumbo's resilience, wit, and outrage in the face of a national disgrace."

"Trumbo could be funny, as when he called Albert Ellis, the author of Sex Without Guilt, 'the greatest humanitarian since Mahatma Gandhi,'" writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "He could be an irascible pain in the neck, as when he excoriates his local phone company for its service. But being dull, or compromising what he believed, was never an option."

"Balancing the political and the personal is a smart idea, though the resulting togglethon ends up being the uneasiest of marriages," writes David Fear in Time Out New York.

Online listening tip. Screenwriter Christopher Trumbo (Dalton's son) and director Peter Askin are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Posted by dwhudson at June 25, 2008 3:56 PM