In The New Republic, Jim Lardner writes: The Dalton Trumbo I Knew. Excerpt from a beautifully written and perceptive article:
Before I knew anything of his filmography or biography, Dalton Trumbo was a large figure in my childhood—a verbal swordsman with a crackly voice and a courtly manner who made his speeches pleasing to the ear. His visits would keep me up past my bedtime; I would sneak out of my room to eavesdrop on whatever-the-crazy-hell he was saying around the corner in the living room.
It was big news in our family when, in January 1960, Otto Preminger announced that Trumbo would have his name on the screen as the writer of Exodus. Kirk Douglas claims he had already resolved to give Trumbo credit for Spartacus, and thus deserves to be remembered as the producer who broke the blacklist. I don’t buy it. That kind of decision doesn’t count until you go public, as Preminger did while Douglas and his partners were still debating the question.
But Spartacus was a resounding statement in itself—a widescreen eye-opener, with all of human history folded into a piece of ancient history as reimagined by Trumbo and Howard Fast, the author of the book the movie was based on (and another ex-communist, it so happens). Trumbo had tied the civil rights and civil liberties struggles of his own time—resistance to McCarthyism and the blacklist included—to a fight that went back two thousand years.
“The enemies of the state are known,” the new dictator Crassus tells the old populist Gracchus after the defeat of Spartacus and his slave army. “Arrests are in progress. The prisons begin to fill. In every city and province, lists of the disloyal have been filed.”
Spartacus is also a rich display of Trumbo’s craftsmanship and screenwriting chutzpah. I’m thinking, for example, of Varinia encountering Spartacus on the cross, and, within the sightlines of an absent-minded Roman soldier, hoisting their infant son into the air, telling Spartacus the child will grow up free, and pleading with him to hurry up and die. That is an insanely great scene.
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