Trumbo

This informative documentary focuses on the renowned screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (1905-1976) and especially on the period when he found himself on the blacklist. The film was written by his son Christopher Trumbo. Celebrated film actors such as Donald Sutherland, Liam Neeson, Michael Douglas, Joan Allen, David Strathairn, Nathan Lane, Paul Giamatti and Josh Lucas give shape to the legend of Trumbo with ‘his voice’.
Trumbo started working as a scriptwriter in 1935 and within 10 years he became one of the best paid men in the profession. In 1947 he was called to give evidence to the House Un-American Activities Committee, suspected of having communist sympathies. Along with nine other ‘hostile’ witnesses, he was to go down in history as The Hollywood Ten. They were put on the blacklist and then imprisoned. After his time in jail, Trumbo continued writing under pseudonyms, earning him an Oscar for instance for The Brave One. It was primarily thanks to Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger (both can be seen in the film) that Trumbo was really taken off the blacklist – the very first – and allowed to write screenplays for respectively Spartacus and Exodus.
The documentary combines interviews with friends of Dalton Trumbo with fragments from the many letters he wrote in those years and in which he reveals himself to be a passionate, complex and convincing defender of free speech. (EH)