Dalton Trumbo was on his way to a lucrative Hollywood career when politics intervened. An acclaimed novelist and a successful screenwriter, Trumbo received an Oscar nomination for Kitty Foyle (1940) and credit for Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) and Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (1945). They were popular movies in their day, but Trumbo is much better remembered for his defiance during the 1947 Congressional investigation of Communist subversion in Hollywood. Refusing to answer whether he was a member of the Communist Party, he was indicted for contempt of Congress, spent a year in prison and was blacklisted by the Hollywood studios.
Larry Ceplair, working with the screenwriter’s late son Christopher, has produced a massive biography, Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical (published by University Press of Kentucky). Almost of necessity, Blacklisted Hollywood Radical is a warmly supportive work, defending Trumbo in his arguments with such fellow targets of Congressional investigators as director Edward Dmytryk; it champions Trumbo’s sometimes disputed contributions as a ghostwriter during the decade he was blacklisted. One of his anonymous screenplays became a classic, Roman Holiday (1953), although sniping continues over who did what and how much. Blacklisted Hollywood Radical is clearly the authorized version of Trumbo’s life, yet Ceplair gives space to all reasonable contentions as he reviews the evidence.
Trumbo was a Communist and if he eventually resigned his party membership, he continued to believe that he and his comrades were fighting for a better world against obvious injustices. Ceplair’s character of study of Trumbo as a person of stubborn integrity, a relentless adversary whose “barbed tongue and slashing pen drew blood from foe and friend alike,” will probably endure as an important reference to an interesting life.
Unlike some victims of the blacklist, Trumbo had a successful final act. He became more successful than ever after returning to screenwriting under his own name for Exodus (1960) and Spartacus (1960). Like most of the Hollywood movies he wrote, Trumbo’s story had a happy ending after enduring a middle period of great adversity.
