Guilty by Suspicion DVD

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starring: Robert De Niro, Annette Bening directed by: Irwin Winkler

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Average Rating: Rating: - Underrated This movie is a saddening look at one of America's darkest times. It has received lots of negative reviews, but don't listen to them. It is the best movie I have seen about the times and it captures the essence of Hollywood during the 1950s when McCarthy and the House Un-American Committee were at the peak of power. Robert De Niro is excellent, as always, as David Merrill, a director with success, fans, and he is living his dream. Then he goes on a vacation, and when he returns, the town is different. The movie opens up with a typical Committee meeting in which David's friend Larry is spooked by the committee. Before long he is burning his books and disowning his wife as a communist. Red Fever has hit town, and David is next in line. Somebody has named him as a Communist sympathyzer, and he refuses to testify to the Committee because he is angry and doesn't want to hurt his friends. Before long he finds he cannot get a job, not directing, producing, or even working in a film repair shop. His life is turned upside down, and he decides finally to testify to the Committee. The acting is what makes this movie, De Niro, but also Annette Bening, George Wendt, Martin Scorsese is great in a cameo. My favorite part is when one cast member is called a commie by the producer for siding with David. "I turned in commies without the government even asking. If you want to call me a commie, you got to back it up." David replies, "If he wants to call you a commie, he doesn't need to back it up." Some people say it is contrived or unbelievable, but the transformation in David, from materialistic director to a man seeing the need to defy the McCarthyists is done well. If you like history, or if you like De Niro, you will enjoy this film. Rating: - Paranoia at its worst This is a great film about one of the darkest period of American history, the Committee on Un-American activities in 1952, what is known as McCarthyism. It deals only with Hollywood though it had a quite wider range. What is striking about the film is that it looks at this unbearable negation of the American constitution only from the human consequences it created : wives, children, and of course husbands too, but most of the victims were men, at least as shown in the film. The people who came under suspicion were tracked down, under permanent surveillance from the FBI, and they lost all their jobs, all employment possibilities, in the film industry but also in any field possible, no matter how small. They were pushed into suicide, or dereliction. They lost their houses, their property, any means of living and they had to disappear. Happy were those who had passports from other countries, because they were able to leave the country in time, like Charlie Chaplin, and to get refuge in England, France or other countries. There is absolutely no excuse for this action, even if there are many explanations : the Cold War, the anticommunist panic, jealousy and competition from those who were not at the top and managed to get rid of those who were at the top and blocked them, ambition to be able to have a career even if the ambitious did not have the value of their victims, etc. It created a society based on rumors, denunciations, hatred, and a total lack of human values and rejection of all moral and ethical principles. The State had become crazy and had reinvented the fascism that it had fought in Germany and Italy. But the worst part of it is that it took America twenty years to repair the damage. And some were not repairable, like the execution of the Rosenbergs. In spite of all, the film is optimistic on human nature, too optimistic, because it is centered on two friends who refuse to talk, who refuse to answer the questions and give names. But those courageous individuals are so few that this optimism is reduced to nearly nothing, a few human beings who consider that their principles, the very principles of their American constitution are more important than their present and their future, that it is easier to explain to their children the victimization they suffer than to explain to them when they are of age that their fathers or mothers had been finks, unhuman an inhumane vultures giving their own friends to the claws of vengeance rather than defending those friends as best they could, which was their Christian duty too. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Paris Universities II and IX. Rating: - St Thomas More Step Aside Here Comes Robert Merrill This movie replaces character development and plot with an earnestly earnest exposition on well-known historical facts. It is about the victimization of people by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities (HUAC). Robert De Niro protrays a movie director (Robert Merrill) who with unflinching courage defends himself from false accusations, protects his friends' reputations and exposes the committee for the know-nothing jingoists that they are. It would have been a much better movie if De Niro's character was a human being and not a preternatural being of infinite virtue and courage. He, with a steely gaze, destroys his own and his estranged wife's lives with his unyielding principles. St Thomas More would have to acknowedge that compared to the Robert Merrill character, he was a moral coward. HUAC is now an historical fact with the judgement of history revealing it as an hysterical reaction to a mythical threat. The real question about this movie is why its creators thought that they had to reveal the same historical facts to their audience with paste board characters in a stilted plot. If they had used the HUAC hearings as a backdrop to examine someone whose world had been talken from him unjustly, this could have been a fascinating movie. However that would be a different movie in which the personalities of the characters would have been more than stock political cliches.

Guilty by Suspicion DVD

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