MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > "Hitchcock"(2012) -- About Psycho -- And...

"Hitchcock"(2012) -- About Psycho -- And "Trumbo" (2015): Connected

posted 5 years ago by ecarle (14979)
1 reply | jump to latest

So I watched "Trumbo" the other day. Its a 2015 film about the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was perhaps the most famous and celebrated of the blacklisted screenwriters of the 40's and 50's, to wit:

ONE: He'd been very successful(A Guy Named Joe) and wealthy in the 40s (as one of his pals chides him , " a rich Hollywood Communist?")

TWO: He defied the HUAC...and did prison time. 10 months.

THREE: During the Blacklist, he sold scripts under another name(sharing the $ with his "fronts") and anonymously won the Oscar twice -- for "Roman Holiday" (1953) a movie with big stars from Paramount, and for "The Brave One" (1956) a movie from cheapjack King Brothers studios , starring a Mexican cast.

FOUR: Trumbo "broke the blacklist" with two movies in the same year, 1960. The movies were Spartacus(produced by and starring Kirk Douglas, directed by Kubrick) and Exodus(produced/directed by Otto Preminger, starring Paul Newman.)

And lived happily ever after.

The first thing I noticed about "Trumbo" is that it shared three actors with "Hitchcock," the 2012 movie about the making of Psycho:

Helen Mirren(Alma Hitchcock in Hitchcock, villainous Hedda Hopper, with the big hats, here.)

Michael Stuhlbarg(Lew Wasserman in Hitchcock, Edward G. Robinson here -- though never using Eddie G's famous voice, and barely made up to look like him.)

Richard Portnow (Paramount head Barney Balaban in Hitchcock, MGM head Louis B. Mayer here.)

Portnow, first. Though he plays two different real-life studio heads in "Hitchcock" and "Trumbo" -- its almost as if he's the same one in both movies. I assume an "in joke" here -- he'd played the studio head in Hitchcock, put him in the same slot, here. (It had been done before when Martin Arbogast Balsam played studio heads back to back in The Carpetbaggers and Harlow in the 60's.)

In both films, Portnow's studio boss is grappling with a problem: He doesn't want to make Psycho...and he doesn't want to hire Trumbo anymore(Mirren's Hedda Hopper calls him a bad Jewish slur and bullies him into it.)

As for Helen Mirren, in both Hitchcock and Trumbo..she's a big, major star. And her tough Alma Hitchcock here becomes the tougher(and meaner) Hedda Hopper.

Michael Stuhlberg is a bit more of a chameleon. His Lew Wasserman had that uber-agent's savvy and toughness; here he gives us Edward G. Robinson as a more refined man. Eddie gets blacklisted and names names to HUAC, but he does make the point to Trumbo "you can hide as a writer behind your fake fronts, all I have is this(points to his FACE.)"

The other connection between Hitchcock and Trumbo is that both films eventually "nest" in 1959 and 1960 and bring in some famous movies and stars and directors of that "cusp."

Hitchcock gave us Hitchcock, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, and Tony Perkins(and even Martin Balsam in a blink and you miss it appearance)

Trumbo gives us Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger -- and a funny scene where they both run into each other at Trumbo's modest little LA house and realize they're both trying to break the blacklist at the same time with the same writer. (In real life, Otto and Kirk would make a movie together 5 years later: In Harm's Way. With John Wayne -- who also appears in Trumbo as a right wing Commie hater.)

The point is this: NONE of the people playing these major stars and star directors really look like the stars and star directors. You can't "copy" a star.

Still, Trumbo succeeds where Hitchcock was not allowed. The makers of Hitchocck were not allowed to use scenes, script pages, or clips from Psycho. But Trumbo DOES use a clip from Spartacus and its sly how they use it -- the long shots are from the original, as are close-ups of Jean Simmons, Woody Strode, and Laurence Olivier(in the gripping gladiator fight that Strode "throws" to his doom)> But they keep inserting close-ups of the GUY PLAYING KIRK DOUGLAS...as Douglas. And it works.

Imagine if "Hitchocck" had been able to use clips from Psycho -- and then inserted Scarlett Johannassen(Janet Leigh) , Jessica Biel(Vera Miles) or James D'Aarcy(Tony Perkins) INTO those clips. "Trumbo" has this freedom and so, "you are there" in 1960 at the movies.

Bryan Cranston -- forever of "Breaking Bad" but currently a "freed" character guy -- is just fine as Trumbo, what with his speeches and his witticisms and his moustache. Diane Lane gets the supportive, long suffering wife role. John Goodman has fun as the low-grade movie maker who gives Trumbo a lot of low-pay work (he reminded me of Big Mike Starr in "Ed Wood," same kind of bottom feeder.)

And Louis CK is fine as Trumbo's "more Communist" Hollywood friend. Too bad we won't be seeing HIM around anymore. For awhile -- its Hollywood.

[–] ecarle (14979) 5 years ago

I took at look at Trumbo's filmography AFTER he was "freed" by Douglas and Otto. Funny thing: he seems to have become "just another screenwriter" with few credits(I suppose he did a lot of uncredited polish.)

He wrote: Lonely Are the Brave(that Kirk Douglas film I love --but it was a flop, and its always been a little TOO preachy -- a Trumbo weakness.)

He wrote: Hawaii(from the Michener novel, a big epic.)

He wrote: Papillon(from the best-seller, it was about prison life on Devil's Island -- Trumbo knew from prison life.)

He wrote(and directed): a low-budget anti-war piece called "Johnny Got his Gun"(from his own novel) and..

..it seems that's about it. Still, that's more big movie credits than Joseph Stefano ever got (and a bit even with Ernest Lehman.)

Some final stray thoughts:

The guy who played Otto Preminger was good -- shaved head, commanding. I'm reminded -- as Hitchcock's legacy suffers though his unconsummated Tippi Hedren scandal -- that Otto had a LOT of affairs(one with black actress Dorothy Dandridge), and had a child with famous stripper Gypsy Rose Lee(go, Otto!) That child grew up to work on Otto's movies -- and to play a besieged waiter in "The Heartbreak Kid." Meanwhile, married Kirk Douglas fessed up to a lot of affairs in his book. Defending that to Phil Donahue, Douglas said "well, I'm married to a EUROPEAN woman, and we have a very EUROPEAN marriage."

And there's ol' Hitch...got nothing.

There's a great bit of dialogue between Otto and Trumbo, from a book I've read on Otto:

Otto: Your script for Exodus isn't brilliant enough, Trumbo.
Trumbo: I find if every scene is brilliant, the movie becomes monotonous.
Otto: I tell you what: you write every scene brilliantly, and I will direct unevenly.

Ah...carry me back to 1960.