****SPOILERS**** Intelligent and uncompromising movie with an almost total lack of the false heroics, on the part of those victimized, that you would usually expect in films like these of the Hollywood "Blacklist" years.
It's September 1951 and Hollywood's "Golden Boy" director David Merrill, Robert de Niro, has just come back from France where he spent the last three years making movies for Fox Studios. David has come back to a country that doesn't resemble the free and open, to ideas and opinions, nation that he left. It's not long afterwords that he's hit with the stark reality of the overblown and self-righteous House of Un-America Activities Committee (HUAC) that destroyed, financially as well as psychically, thousands of people in the entertainment world for no other reason then to throw it's weight around in fighting the communist menace. which it unconsciously did more to advance in its own very Un-American and Un-Constituional witch hunts and hearings.
David finds his friends in the entertainment industry in a white panic the very first evening, at a welcome home party at his house, when screen writer Larry Noland, Chris Cooper, got into a very heated exchange with his actress wife Dorothy, Patricia Wetting, over him naming names at a secret HUAC hearing. The names that included some of his, and Dorothy's, life long friends in the industry. Called into he office of his boss 20th Century Fox head man Darryl Zanuck, Ben Piazza, David's told that he'll soon be subpoenaed to testify before HUAC and if he values his job in movies, or anywhere else in the entertainment world, he'd better tell them what they want to hear.David is even told to turn in his own wife Ruth, Annette Bennings, as being a member of the Communist Party if that's what they wan't David to do!
Excellent recreation of a period of American History that we'd very well wan't to forget. Robert de Niro is at his very best as the troubled and self-doubting Hollywood director David Merrill who during the entire movie is caught between a rock and a hard place.David is given a way out, by HUCA, to rat out his friends and associates for among other things an anti-Atomic Bomb Peace rally that they attended in 1946.
There's no real winners in the movie "Guilty by Suspicion" with everyone in it from David on down being forced one way or another out of the profession that they chose, creativity in movies books and on the stage,to put all their hearts and souls into. There's poor Dorothy Noland who's career as an actress was destroyed and even had her young son Matthew taken away from her by being falsely accused by her rat-fink husband Larry, working in concert with HUAC, as an unfit mother. With all doors in Hollywood and on Broadway closed to her and never seeing young Matthew again Dorothy started to drink heavily. One evening after saying goodbye to David and Ruth at a restaurant in L.A Dorothy, at the end of her line,got herself smashed on drinks and ended up really getting smashed by killing herself in a car smash-up. The smear-mongering scoundrels of HUAC had the gal to grill David about her, Dorothy, being a communist, which she wasn't, even with her body still warm in her grave!
David for his part, who was anything but a hero up until then, just had enough and threw caution, that his lawyer Felix Graff (Sam Wanamaker) told him to have, and his career to the wind and let the Grand Inquisitor Chairman Woods, Gallard Sartain, an his two sneering and sanctimonious deputies Congressmen Tavennar & Veld, Robin Gammell & Brad Sullivan, have it. David tells them: "In the name of ridding the world of Communism you destroyed her life! Have you no shame in what your doing! She's DEAD!" David did indeed become a hero at the end of the movie but not because he wanted to be one but because his conscience and love of country and just plain human decency wouldn't let him be anything else.
It's September 1951 and Hollywood's "Golden Boy" director David Merrill, Robert de Niro, has just come back from France where he spent the last three years making movies for Fox Studios. David has come back to a country that doesn't resemble the free and open, to ideas and opinions, nation that he left. It's not long afterwords that he's hit with the stark reality of the overblown and self-righteous House of Un-America Activities Committee (HUAC) that destroyed, financially as well as psychically, thousands of people in the entertainment world for no other reason then to throw it's weight around in fighting the communist menace. which it unconsciously did more to advance in its own very Un-American and Un-Constituional witch hunts and hearings.
David finds his friends in the entertainment industry in a white panic the very first evening, at a welcome home party at his house, when screen writer Larry Noland, Chris Cooper, got into a very heated exchange with his actress wife Dorothy, Patricia Wetting, over him naming names at a secret HUAC hearing. The names that included some of his, and Dorothy's, life long friends in the industry. Called into he office of his boss 20th Century Fox head man Darryl Zanuck, Ben Piazza, David's told that he'll soon be subpoenaed to testify before HUAC and if he values his job in movies, or anywhere else in the entertainment world, he'd better tell them what they want to hear.David is even told to turn in his own wife Ruth, Annette Bennings, as being a member of the Communist Party if that's what they wan't David to do!
Excellent recreation of a period of American History that we'd very well wan't to forget. Robert de Niro is at his very best as the troubled and self-doubting Hollywood director David Merrill who during the entire movie is caught between a rock and a hard place.David is given a way out, by HUCA, to rat out his friends and associates for among other things an anti-Atomic Bomb Peace rally that they attended in 1946.
There's no real winners in the movie "Guilty by Suspicion" with everyone in it from David on down being forced one way or another out of the profession that they chose, creativity in movies books and on the stage,to put all their hearts and souls into. There's poor Dorothy Noland who's career as an actress was destroyed and even had her young son Matthew taken away from her by being falsely accused by her rat-fink husband Larry, working in concert with HUAC, as an unfit mother. With all doors in Hollywood and on Broadway closed to her and never seeing young Matthew again Dorothy started to drink heavily. One evening after saying goodbye to David and Ruth at a restaurant in L.A Dorothy, at the end of her line,got herself smashed on drinks and ended up really getting smashed by killing herself in a car smash-up. The smear-mongering scoundrels of HUAC had the gal to grill David about her, Dorothy, being a communist, which she wasn't, even with her body still warm in her grave!
David for his part, who was anything but a hero up until then, just had enough and threw caution, that his lawyer Felix Graff (Sam Wanamaker) told him to have, and his career to the wind and let the Grand Inquisitor Chairman Woods, Gallard Sartain, an his two sneering and sanctimonious deputies Congressmen Tavennar & Veld, Robin Gammell & Brad Sullivan, have it. David tells them: "In the name of ridding the world of Communism you destroyed her life! Have you no shame in what your doing! She's DEAD!" David did indeed become a hero at the end of the movie but not because he wanted to be one but because his conscience and love of country and just plain human decency wouldn't let him be anything else.