Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical by Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo

Those of his films that cannot be dismissed as sophisticated but uninspired hackwork are inevitably cursed with either preachy self-importance or cheery (but still preachy) patriotism.
  --Richard Corliss on Dalton Trumbo, Talking Pictures, The Overlook Press, 1974

Christopher Trumbo started this book and Ceplair took over in 2011 when Christopher died.  It is a fascinating biography of a screenwriter and a member of the Hollywood Ten who went to jail when, in 1947, he refused to answer questions asked by The House Committee on Un-American Activities (a strange name indeed for a Congressional committee).  Trumbo worked for nine years in a bakery while he worked on novels; Eclipse, his eighth novel, was published in 1935.  This led to a job as a reader at Warner Brothers and eventually a lucrative screenwriting career.  After his refusal to answer questions from HUAC in 1947 he was blacklisted, moved to Mexico for awhile and continued to write screenplays using "fronts" and pseudonyms.  When the blacklist was effectively coming to an end, with changing times, Trumbo's name went on Spartacus, thanks to Kirk Douglas, and Exodus, thanks to Otto Preminger.  Both films came out in 1960.  In 1970 Trumbo received an award from the Writers' Guild of America and gave an intelligent and compassionate speech, in which he said, "The blacklist was a time of evil; no one on either side who survived came through untouched by evil."  Trumbo rightly assigned the blame to HUAC rather than to those who, unlike himself, testified and named names.  In 1971 Trumbo directed a film version of his 1939 novel Johnny Got His Gun.  I saw the film that year at MoMA and Trumbo talked about the film with intense passion and a love for movies.

Two questions remain largely unexplored by Ceplair:  how dogmatic a communist was Trumbo from 1943 to 1947 when he was a member of the party and how good of a screenwriter was he.  Corliss enthusiastically  recommends the collection of Trumbo letters, Additional Dialogue (M. Evans and Company 1970) that captures Trumbo's written wit and style.  But these letters say little about his political beliefs or actions, which seem to have mostly consisted of joining organizations and donating money.  Among the films Trumbo worked on there are two that stand out:  Gun Crazy (1950) and The Prowler (1951), the first directed by Joseph H. Lewis, the second by Joseph Losey (who eventually was threatened by the blacklist and left for England before his passport, like Trumbo's, was revoked).  These films were worked on when Trumbo was blacklisted and it is almost impossible to determine how much he actually wrote of them. Trumbo was for hire, wrote mostly for uninspired directors and didn't seem to have a vision himself, except a passion against fascism and for peace.