GUILTY BY SUSPICION
There are plenty of bones one can pick with Guilty by Suspicion, the first Hollywood feature devoted in its entirety to the film-industry blacklist (The Front dealt with TV). Of course there are plenty of bones one can pick with just about any movie, if one is so inclined. But critics, at least, seem more inclined to be so inclined with movies that deal with political subjects. This is not to say that most critics reprove such movies on political grounds; on the contrary, they usually harp on other aspects. But one still winds up feeling that it’s frequently the politics that gets their hackles up.
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I do have my own objections to Guilty by Suspicion, and one of them is fundamental if not all-encompassing. But let me deal with my minor cavils first. While the handling of period (1951-52) decor, dress, and Hollywood social ambience seems fairly judicious, the characters’ speech–especially the slang they use–has more to do with the 70s or 80s than with the 50s. And when it comes to specific references to events, films, and directors of the period–some of them direct, some of them indirect–one has to grant the picture a certain license with the details. For example, when we see Ethel and Julius Rosenberg about to be executed, the year is 1952, not 1953 as it should be. In scenes set in 1951, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and The Boy With Green Hair (1948) are both in production, and while the production date of High Noon is correct (1952), the movie is oddly converted into a Monogram quickie without star actors. Martin Scorsese plays a character clearly meant to suggest Joseph Losey (who directed The Boy With Green Hair), but he doesn’t seem very much like him. (A Broadway stage director named Abe Barron is clearly based on Abe Burrows; the character of Dorothy Nolan, played by Patricia Wettig, is derived from Dorothy Comingore, who played Kane’s second wife in Citizen Kane; Nolan’s husband Larry, played by Chris Cooper, seems a fusion of Comingore’s husband Richard Collins and actor Larry Parks.) Another oddity is the overall absence of Jews in this portrait of early 50s Hollywood; it will seem especially peculiar to anyone who believes that anti-Semitism played a role in the cold war hysteria that made the blacklist possible.
According to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, “Polonsky completed a screenplay about an American Communist who succeeded in holding onto his political beliefs but ultimately was forced into exile in France.” The same article reports that Polonsky not only withdrew his name from Winkler’s script, but also refused an executive producer credit on the film, even though it would have paid him a handsome fee. The hero of Winkler’s film, David Merrill (Robert De Niro), is basically a liberal who attended two or three Communist meetings during the Depression (until he was thrown out of one for his opinions), but is not especially political otherwise, at least until the House Committee on Un-American Activities forces him into a political position by asking him to inform on his friends. He’s a victim of the blacklist mainly because he wants to go on practicing his profession but refuses to give names to the committee. One isn’t made to feel that he has a political voice that the committee has silenced; his voice is simply the voice of decency, suggesting Joseph Welch at the Army-McCarthy hearings–a parallel that is drawn overtly through a couple of the lines Merrill speaks at his own hearing, the last and most effective scene in the film.
Both movies are concerned specifically with the bureaucratic obstacles that poor people face–From This Day Forward focuses on the postwar adjustments of a struggling white couple on the job market (Joan Fontaine and Mark Stevens), while Claudine concerns the comic struggles of a black couple (welfare mother Diahann Carroll and garbageman James Earl Jones) with the welfare system. And Berry’s mise en scene is wholly a function of his understanding of what his characters are up against, not his capacity to draft pretty pictures a la Hitchcock on a sketch pad. Originally a theater person (he began as a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre in the 30s), Berry, like Polonsky and John Garfield, is a specifically urban type whose talent is virtually indistinguishable from his street smarts; in Guilty by Suspicion, De Niro’s David Merrill may sport a Garfield haircut, but he barrels around Hollywood in a snazzy white convertible, and we’re asked to believe that one of his biggest personal tragedies is having to part with that car.
By alluding to the publicist’s former association with the FBI, I merely want to suggest the aggressiveness of his manner; I don’t want to employ any McCarthyite tactics myself by implying through this that he was involved in the Hollywood blacklist. (Warner Brothers as a studio had a pretty terrible blacklist record, but it would be hypocritical and unethical to assign any guilt by suspicion in this regard.) I should also acknowledge that this individual’s behavior is aberrant rather than typical in this day and age; but such behavior was equally aberrant before the blacklist took hold, and I can now easily imagine how unexpected the initial interrogations must have been for the first people who were called up. (Garfield was one of these, and while he refused to give names, he didn’t live long afterward. Polonsky, who featured Garfield in his 1948 masterpiece Force of Evil, put it succinctly: “He defended his streetboy’s honor and they killed him for it.”)
