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?
No comments:
Post a Comment