GUILTY BY SUSPICION no stars

 Yet another movie about the HUAC and the Hollywood Ten but far from the best. Irwin Winkler directed and was given screenplay credit after the original writer Abraham Polonsky insisted on having his name removed from the credits, (the central character is based on Polonsky). Winkler takes a gloves-on approach and yet one at times that seems to border on hysteria and despite a first-rate cast this is still a pretty terrible movie.

Robert De Niro is the Polonsky character, a director returning to Hollywood in the middle of a communist witch-hunt where it seems anyone working is an informer and anyone who doesn't 'name names' can't get a job. It's fundamentally fiction but fiction that mixes in real characters such as Darryl F. Zanuck, Sterling Hayden, Howard Da Silva etc. For added 'authenticity', (there's even an abysmal reference to "High Noon"), but this only reduces everything to the level of caricature and as movies about Hollywood in general go, this one is way down the pecking order.

De Niro, probably thinking by appearing he was doing his bit for 'liberalism', tries very hard throughout to make his character seem in some way profound but fails miserably. Annette Bening is his faithful ex-wife, Martin Scorsese, in a good cameo, is a director based on Joseph Losey but it's left to Sam Wanamaker as a lawyer on the side of the committee rather than his clients to give the film a modicum of class. The movie does kick-start magnificently in the last ten minutes when De Niro gets in front of the committee and does his Joseph N. Welch bit but by then it's much too late. How could a movie with this subject matter and this cast be this bad?

ROBBERY **

 Peter Yates' "Robbery" may be based on the Great Train Robbery but it begins with a spectacular car chase through the streets of London after a robbery of a lesser kind. It may not be up to the standard of Yates' later "Bullitt" or "The French Connection" but as car chases go it does the business and sets the scene for an above average crime flic and one that's been largely forgotten.

Stanley Baker, who also co-produced, is the mastermind and other villains include Barry Foster, Frank Finlay, George Sewell, Clinton Greyn and William Marlowe while an unlikely James Booth is on the side of the law. It came at the tail-end of a good period for British crime movies and was probably influential in giving Yates his break in America. Joanna Pettet gets star billing as Baker's wife but may as well not be in the picture.