User Reviews

Robert De Niro is a highly successful screenwriter and director in Hollywood of the early 1950s. Twelve years earlier, during the Great Depression, he attended meetings of communists in the homes of some friends. Now anti-communism is sweeping the country in the wake of the Rosenbergs and De Niro, along with many of his friends, becomes a person of interest to the FBI and to a congressional committee that wants him to "name names", as they used to say.

Some of his friends who are still communist sympathizers flee to England. The rest are mostly terrified. De Niro's lawyer friend, Sam Wanamaker, urges him to spill the beans because, what the heck, it's all going to blow over some day and why should he ruin his life? But De Niro thinks he's above it all, too well-known and too much of a money maker for the studio. He's wrong. Daryl F. Zanuck wants him to continue working but only if he gives up his friends. (Real names are sometimes used, and historical situations simulated.) He loses his livelihood, his car, his house, his friends, and his intransigence drives away his estranged wife. Broke, he leaves Hollywood for New York but his theater friends won't touch him. Back to Hollywood on a Greyhound bus, where he finds a job directing a picture for Monogram, but he's fired before he can finish it.

De Niro is subpoenaed and appears before the congressional committee whose loud-mouthed members browbeat him until he's removed from the room. The ending is ambiguous.

It would be easy to dismiss this as some sort of America-bashing on the part of the movie makers, and in a way it is, since it's a reasonably accurate portrayal of a particularly shameful incident in American history. There were of course communists and socialists around in Hollywood, but the hysteria that accompanied this conviction caused more damage than the disease itself.

A thought experiment suggests itself. As I write this, many Americans support a social and political movement called the Tea Party. Imagine if, fifteen or twenty years from now, the political climate had shifted dramatically and Tea Party sentiments were widely viewed as treasonable. All of a sudden a lot of people who were caught up in these rallies and picnics are persecuted by the FBI and, if defiant, get to spend some time in jail. It could happen. It happened to casual supporters of workers' causes during the depression, the kind of people that De Niro's character represents. Sociologists call these waves of collective hysteria "moral panics." They're not uncommon. We've had witches, Satanists, pre-school child molesters, Illuminati, Masons, and so forth. Common sense gets lost along the way.

De Niro is fine, as usual. He looks the part of the free thinker. He wears loose and sloppy clothes and has long, tousled hair. The period decor is accurate. And some of the incidents, such as De Niro's court appearance, look overdrawn and yet are very closely modeled on some film clips of the real congressional committee's conduct. "Typical communist response. Step away from the table." So why isn't it more successful? Partly because the plot is so mechanical. One thing leads predictably to another. The audience is always far ahead of De Niro's character. We all know pride goeth before a fall, and that he's going to wind up in somebody's "Fix It Shop" on a side street in New York before he bounces back after an infusion of some moral roborant and that he will wind up with his wife again. It's like watching a long and preachy After School Special.

Perhaps one of the worst things a message movie can do is overdramatize the problem. "Guilty by Suspicion" shows us an actress whose life was ruined by the movement committing suicide. Then we get to see the mourners at the funeral. It's too much. We don't need the death. It interferes with our suspension of disbelief. Or -- if you insist on killing someone in an attempt to increase the audience's involvement -- you'd better do it well, and this suicide is sketchy as hell. We've hardly met the woman. We can be grateful that De Niro doesn't pause on the stage and come out with a soliloquy along the lines of, "I can't give up my friends because it would be an immoral act...." The worst he says is, "Am I supposed to spend the rest of my life dreaming what I could have been?" (Most of us do, Bobby.) That doesn't rob the film of its irony. One of the reasons the committee wants to nail De Niro is that he attended a demonstration that urged an end to nuclear weapons, which happened to be one of Ronald Reagan's announced goals towards the end of his administration.

****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.

This film is poignant because later on De Niro appeared on stage with Elia Kazan when the famed director accepted a special Oscar amidst the McCarthyist controversy.

Are we allowed to judge people on the basis of their actions? I want to say 'yes' because such abstract words as 'principles', 'conscience', 'morality'… only take their full meaning when they are compromised, and since our conscience is the compass that either guides or misleads the path of our life, at the end, not only we can but we should judge someone from what he or she did.

Yet, what speaks in favor of our right to judge? Till today, many French people ask themselves which choice they'd have made during the German occupation: resistance, collaboration … or neither, and no one would deny how often the entire population of France has been blamed, especially by American, just because some of it did collaborate. But History wanted to submit those very judges to a similar case of moral dilemmas through the infamous Joseph McCarthy and an institution whose acronym immediately reminds of America's darkest hours: HUAC, House of Un-American Activities Committee.

A few movies dealt with McCarthyism, as if Hollywood itself was ashamed of that indelible stain in its memory, when a part of the Artistic community surrendered to the pressure of HUAC, by denouncing colleagues, friends, sometimes both, who were members of the Communist Party, or attended their meetings. The most blatantly disgraceful aspect of the 'Witch Hunt' relied on the fact that most of these meetings were held when Russia was seen as a possible ally against fascism, and many of those who participated to them, were young idealistic artists who only exercised their freedom of actions and ten years later, they could lose their jobs, be blacklisted, jailed, even executed (the Roseneberg case) to fight the … 'Red Scare'.

"Guilty by Suspicion" immediately plunges us in this world of pressure and paranoia, it's literally a descent to hell since the director cares less about making a political statement than paying a modest and gripping tribute to those who sacrificed their jobs and lives, for their principles. A director (Martin Scorsese in a memorable cameo) is forced to leave the country, maybe an allusion to Charlie Chaplin, a notoriously alcoholic actress (Patricia Wettig) is pushed to suicide after her husband (Chris Cooper) did 'his duty' and took his son away from her, people lose their jobs, HUAC is basically the poignant chronicles of a human tragedy, embodied by the central performance of Robert De Niro as David Merryl, a fictional director who crystallizes many aspects of blacklisted directors.

The sober quality of the directing perfectly fits the film, Irwin Winkler is more famous as the producer of "Rocky", "Raging Bull" or "Goodfellas" doesn't stylize his film, it doesn't have the sort of 'period' look of Clooney's films, but the performances the script highlight the tragic aspect of the McCarthyism as the ideology that destroyed people: the victims of course, but let's not forget that in a longer term, those who named would forever live with the intolerable weight of guilt and infamy. Can we judge them, these people whose Elia Kazan remains the most emblematic examples. I guess 'yes', since they acted, according to their conscience, responsibly … they wanted to keep working. Is that enough a motive? "Guilty by Suspicion" gives a good counter-example.

And maybe it's because it's the first De Niro film I ever watched, when I was a kid, but it's one of my favorite performance, as a sympathetic and righteous character, so convinced that he has nothing to blame himself on that his optimism confine to a tragic naivety from our point of view. He has a job, he's a great director, with many friends welcoming him at his return from Europe, his best friend Bunny Baxter (George Wendt) is a renowned screenwriter, and his dedication to his job is estranged him from his wife (Annette Bening) and son. David's job is all his life, so we know it's a matter of time before he loses everything step by step. The thrilling and heart-breaking element on the story is the way the process affects Merryl, almost going through the five stages of grief.

At first, he can't believe that his country jeopardizes his life asking him to betray his friends, his paranoid anger leads then to an extreme anxiety for his future. The bargaining process is illustrated by the scenes with Darryl F. Zanuck, the Fox mogul who asks his protégé to cooperate. At the end, every opportunity finally fails, one of the most significant is the "High Noon" film, the film that best exemplifies McCarthyism. The mental process I just described also affects his buddy Baxter, with a different timing. When Merryl suggests he takes a lawyer, he's in denial, when Merryl is totally disillusioned, Baxter 'bargains' by asking for David's permission to name him, since he was already screwed. Nothing is sadder than witnessing the collapse of a childhood friendship.

We know the resignation time is coming, that David will have face his conscience, sooner or later, the climactic sequence in the courtroom is exceptionally thrilling, because we know where the questions will inevitably lead, when David reckon he attended two party members, he's asked to specify where it was, which means in whose house it was, what follows is just the struggle of a man who holds his life in his hands, and can either clean himself and forever live with the mark of infamy or just screw the Commission, lose everything for his principles, this moment is elevated by De Niro's magnificent performance.

The ending is sad, on the surface, because it states the ultimate downfall of David Merryl who has all the talent, but will not be able to express it but ultimately it's a triumph on morality and principles. And the "Shame on You" is the relieving cry of a man who can finally speak his voice, and put and end of his hellish situation. "Guilty by Suspicion" is a powerful drama that deserves much more recognition.