TRUMBO: FROM LONDON FILM FESTIVAL TO LONDON SCREENS

Trumbo made less of a splash than I expected at the London Film Festival; stories about the movie industry tend to be popular, not least among the press, and stories about the Hollywood blacklist resonate politically. Its release this month has reinforced my perception: most of the attention has been paid to the lead performance by Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo, the screenwriter who was one of the most visible of the Hollywood 10 and, as the movie shows, one of the most active in finding ways to work around the blacklist before becoming the writer whose credits, on Spartacus and Exodus, brought the blacklist out of the closet and ended it once and for all.

It's a worthy film, but not a very exciting one. It fails to build the tension, either politically or personally, and deliberately detours around philosophic questions that might make it fascinating as a film of ideas. This is particularly strange as the paradox of the rich Hollywood communists is one the movie dips its toes into, but basically avoids.

Trumbo instead plays up a certain misconception, one I saw it repeated recently in Sarah Churchwell's Guardian piece about Preston Sturges. She wrote that Sturges 'commanded astronomical fees in an age when most scriptwriters were treated like hacks.' Trumbo was in the same category, but Churchwell's distinction is misleading. First, because regardless of how much money they were paid, virtually all studio writers were treated like hacks. It went with the territory. Second, even the hacks were well paid, which is why Faulkner and Fitzgerald and the like were out there hacking away. The lower level writers weren't paid enough to fund the relatively lavish lifestyles of the Trumbos, but they still were being paid more than most writers, and way more than most people. Even Trumbo gets a 'mere' $1,200 (automatically chiseled down from two grand by Frank King) for his first script for the King Brothers, which he writes in a few days. As Herman Mankiewicz famously cabled Ben Hecht: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around.”

This is one of the Trumbo paradoxes the movie dodges. Cranston's performance is a tour de force, but it's as studied, if not affected, as the writer himself: all cigarette holders, dry speeches in faux folksy, bathtub work station and the like. Trumbo was the most publicly recognizable of the Ten, partly because he may have been the most highly-paid writer in Hollywood, partly because of the affectation, but the group was diverse—something the film plays down by condensing the more down-to-earth communists into one character, played (in a performance that has not received the attention it deserved) by the comedian Louis CK. Yet rather than be a foil for Trumbo, he's there mostly to prove what a good guy Trumbo was, then die off conveniently. The real politics of the CPUSA cell in Hollywood have been dissected elsewhere; John Howard Lawson, who doesn't feature here, was in charge; a highly-paid Stalinist who may be best remembered now for his attack on Albert Maltz for questioning the party's attempts to control what members wrote.

More interesting is the personal level: Trumbo's explanation to his daughter of why he's a communist sounds like a modern democrat trying to explain why he's a 'liberal'. It reminded me of Guilty By Suspicion, written by blacklist victim Abraham Polonsky, who had his name removed from the credits when the Robert DeNiro character who won't inform was changed from a communist to a generic liberal. In the end, films about the blacklist (Guilty By Suspicion or The Front) always seem to boil down to the basic question of loyalty to one's friends; to honour. Trumbo tries to go a long way toward revealing the structural character of the blacklist, but seems to leave Trumbo's own politics out. Actually, he joined CPUSA in 1943: long after many in the party had left in protest of the Hitler/Stalin pact (if not the show trials). Few Americans were flocking to the party in mid-war, and it would have been interesting to hear why Trumbo did. In some ways this might have been more interesting, and no less worthy, as a TV mini-series, with the time to address such conundra.

The movie makes a couple of interesting choices in terms of script and cast. They re-cast incidents, or, as with Louis CK, amalgamate characters for dramatic ease and effect. The most bravura moments in the movie are provided by John Goodman as Frank King, the Poverty Row producer. Goodman's explosive King is a tour de force, though one we've seen before: in Barton Fink and Matinee. In fact, in Matinee the character he's playing is basically William Castle, another guy Trumbo wrote for during the blacklist.

But while Trumbo may have been churning out (and commissioning) dozens and dozens of scripts for the King Bros, they weren't being made into movies by them, that's for sure; the Kings produced only around a dozen films in the years of the blacklist. Trumbo's King Bros. script for The Brave One won an Oscar he couldn't receive (he'd 'get' another for Roman Holiday); but he also wrote the script for Gun Crazy. His work was credited to front Millard Kaufman, along with MacKinley Kantor, who wrote the original magazine story and first version of the screenplay. He hated Trumbo's redoing of it. Go figure, because Joseph H Lewis' movie is a classic. 

The re-cast incidents include John Wayne's confrontation with Trumbo; it happened, but it was Carl Foreman, not Trumbo, who was the object of the Duke's anger. Likewise with the corrupt former head of the House Un-American Affairs committee, Pernell Thomas: the confrontation in prison happened in Danbury, Connecticut, while Trumbo was actually jailed in Kentucky; it was Lester Cole who got the last word on Thomas. And I wondered why, when Otto Preminger goes to Trumbo's bungalow to ask him to write Exodus, they needed to be introduced to each other. Trumbo had written The Court-Martial Of Billy Mitchell for Preminger back in 1955.

The actors playing actors are a mixed bag. David James Elliott as John Wayne and Christian Berkel as Preminger are a little too clean, as is Michael Stuhlbarg as Edward G Robinson; but Stuhlbarg manages to convey the inner turmoil, and perhaps weakness, in Robinson's dilemma of naming names. The most interesting is Dean O'Gorman as Kirk Douglas: he's Douglas played very still as a person, smaller than you'd think, and not as completely dominant as he probably was around this time. Though after Goodman, the show stealer is Helen Mirren as Hedda Hopper. Mirren looks so much like Patricia Clarkson in this role I wondered why they hadn't hired the latter, but the thin-skinned edge to her power, and the perhaps incongruous blackmail of Louis B Meyer are done perfectly. But whether Hopper would have actually dared try something like that with Meyer, who'd made her career, is doubtful; here she is stands in for the well-documents worry of the Hollywood moguls about seeming, as rich immigrant Jews, somehow un-American.

While the movie eschews most of Trumbo's political background, it makes the blacklist into a story of family conflict, as the writer uses and alienates his wife and children. Or at least his children, because we really get very little of his wife's reaction, which is a shame because the viewer keeps waiting for Diane Lane's big scene, which you know must be coming, and never does. You can understand why a film would concentrate on the personal dimension; why they would leave that portion of it unexamined is more puzzling.

In the end, Trumbo succeeds in getting to its eponymous character's essence best when we finally see his name on the screen credits once again, and we see the mix of pride and justification, of artistic satisfaction and return to status that play across Cranston's face. Eventually Trumbo's name was restored to the credits of the films he wrote, and the real life coda is indeed a moving one, showing the story is still one that needs telling.

JAMES NAREMORE'S ON KUBRICK

Note: this review appeared, in a somewhat shorter version, in the TLS. I have restored its original argument and made a few updating changes, but otherwise it remains as published in 2007.

Stanley Kubrick remains the most fascinating and perplexing of directors, difficult for critics and audiences to pigeon-hole and, sometimes, to warm to. Kubrick actively resists categorizing: beloved by those who cherish 'independent' film-makers and granted extra kudos among Brit critics for abandoning the US for England, Kubrick actually played the Hollywood system more successfully than most, getting Hollywood finance yet keeping almost total control of his films while ensconced in his Hertfordshire mansion accumulating massive project files and watching American football on TV.

Kubrick befuddles critics because he is at once a master of using film to evoke specific emotions, something he began learning how to do when he was 17 and working as a photographer for Look magazine, and an adapter looking to translate the essence of his material to film. In the latter role, he oftens subjugates film technique to a more intellectual end, sometimes to the detriment of his films' 'entertainment' value (think Barry Lyndon, and how perfectly Kubrick uses Ryan O'Neal to capture the character's essential shallowness). And, as one might expect from the director of Dr Strangelove, a strong vein of satire, or at least deep irony, runs through even his most serious later films.

James Naremore believes a 'grand synthesis' of Kubrick's work to be 'impossible', and it may be that he is right.  His comprehensive study progresses chronologically, setting out most of the important critical positions as it does. Born in the Bronx, a doctor's son, the young Kubrick was an indifferent student but a prodigious auto-didact. Naremore's efforts to define Kubrick as a modernist, and a practitioner of the grotesque, can be understood more simply when one considers the influences of  Weegee and 'New York school' photography, and the artistic climate of early 1950s Greenwich Village.  Oddly, Naremore mentions only in passing that Kubrick audited an English course with Mark Van Doren at Columbia, who at the time was the center for New York's literary modernism.

Kubrick's breakthrough came with The Killing, which I see as a take on John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle; not coincidentially, Sterling Hayden stars in both. It's a more taut caper film, its style more in line with the documentary-style films often associated with film noir (Anthony Mann's T Men for example) than the more shadowy noir which Huston shows. In Huston's world, fate may be battled against, or submitted to, think of Walter Huston's laughter ending The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, or the soldiers facing their fate in The Man Who Would Be King. Huston's film at least brings Hayden back to his dream before he dies. To Kubrick fate is equally harsh, but less amusing, as Hayden's  robbery loot blows across a runway, he refuses to run. 'What's the difference?' he asks.

The Huston comparison is worth more examination.  MGM's Dore Schary, who backed Huston, hired Kubrick after The Killing, but rejected Paths of Glory, worried it might bomb like Huston's anti-war The Red Badge Of Courage. It's interesting that both directors chose to live in symbolic 'exile'; Huston, by birth a Hollywood insider, was as adept at working the system as Kubrick turned out to be. Interesting too, in terms of the system, that Kubrick twice tried to squeeze Jim Thompson out of screenwriting credits

Kubrick's career benefited from good timing.  Kirk Douglas seized on Paths Of Glory when stars were busy setting up their own production companies; he gave Kubrick a budget of $1,000,000 (one-third, of course, going to himself as both producer and star).  Although Kubrick's experience on Douglas’s Spartacus was a nightmare, it was profitable, and taught him a valuable lesson about control. Dr Strangelove was perfectly timed to catch the boom in political satire in America, just before the era of protest began.  Its roots can be seen in the madcap comedy of Ernie Kovacs, whom Kubrick had wanted to star in an earlier project. 2001 coincided with the popularization of mind-expanding drugs, while A Clockwork Orange, which Kubrick withdrew from exhibition in Britain, not only rode the new wave of violence, but commented archly upon it, a point lost totally on the British press and censors.

As I mentioned before, to me Kubrick's films often seem to comment on other films, or literature.  His understanding of the roots of style in Lolita and Barry Lyndon reflects the satirical elements of both Nabokov and Thackery.  His take on 2001 expands from Arthur C Clarke's story, incorporating ideas closer to Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens Of Titan.  Dr Strangelove makes perfect sense as an existentially more convincing absurdist response to the book Fail Safe than its own filmed version did, while Kubrick's Clockwork Orange owes at least as much to Linday Anderson's If as it does to Anthony Burgess' source novel.  It sometimes seems as if he were upstaging his fellow directors who didn't think things as fully through.

For example, Full Metal Jacket marks the apotheosis of the first cycle of Vietnam films, and Kubrick's adaptation questions the assumption of spoiled innocence central not only to Gustav Hasford's novel, but to most of the acclaimed Vietnam films (not least Deer Hunter or Coming Home), to the point I sometimes look at it as a riposte to Oliver Stone's Platoon. The shooting script ended with Joker's (Matthew Modine) death intercut with the 8 year old Joker playing war with a toy rifle and falling down 'dead'.  In the final version, Joker and his buddies march away from a fire fight singing the 'Mickey Mouse Club' song. Existential absurdity or clunky satire?

This small point resonates because Naresome's analysis of the Steven Spielberg version of Kubrick's cherished final project, AI: Artificial Intelligence, is excellent, and Spielberg draws on specific Disney references, which thus take on appropriate irony in the context of Full Metal Jacket.  Here Naresome comes full circle, showing how AI's roots go all the way back to Kubrick's Freudian-influenced modernism which he proposed as a trope at the start of the book.  It's a neater conclusion than that of Kubrick's own last film, Eyes Wide Shut, another literary adaptation (of Schnitzler's 1925 tale of fin de siecle Vienna) which might be thought to bear more directly on Freud. Like The Shining, it is also an essay on dreams, and their repression, on how the responsibilities of life work against the dreamer’s creative freedom. Naremore suggests Eyes Wide Shut may be the only Kubrick film, apart from his very first feature, Killer's Kiss, with a 'happy' ending.  It may be that Delmore Schwartz's ultimate modernist work, 'In Dreams Begin Responsibilities' another product of that late 1940's Columbia/New York era,echoes all the way down through Kubrick’s work. It may be that his defining characteristic as the director is the undercutting of the possibility of happy ends.

On Kubrick by James Naremore
British Film Institute, 299pp, £17.99
ISBN 9781844571420