A waste of 90 minutes of my life

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

Irwin Winkler's "Guilty by Suspicion" looks at the Hollywood blacklist, with Robert DeNiro as a director targeted by HUAC. It's well known that the Hollywood bigwigs were only too happy to collaborate with HUAC. One of the most effective scenes is when they're watching TV and see a report on the Rosenbergs, and how HUAC thinks that any pain felt by the Rosenbergs' sons is a small price to pay for national security (sounds like something that al-Qaeda or ISIS would say, doesn't it?). As for the scene where someone writes down the license plate, I understand that they did that in real life.This is one part of history that particularly needs to get remembered. When some right-wing ideologue calls for rooting out "the other" in the name of Americanism, it simply means that he wants to stay in power at all costs. It's worth noting that Franklin Roosevelt was negotiating with the Soviet Union to make sure that there would be no more wars once WWII was over, but he died and so Truman canceled those plans. Despite having negotiated the division of Europe with the USSR, Truman went along with the claims by McCarthy and Co. that the leftists helped the USSR take over Eastern Europe.Definitely a movie that I recommend. This topic took on a new relevance in the so called War on Terrorism.

This is an important film that never should be allowed to fall out of conscience. It is the sordid and bitter tragedy of the political persecution against writers, directors and actors of Hollywood around 1950 with devastating effects on American cinema - it never became the same again, after reaching its highest levels of artistry and quality in the 1940s. The protagonist David Merrill here is fictitious, but his fate was shared by a vast number of his colleagues, like Jules Dassin, William Dieterle, Abraham Polonsky, Charles Chaplin, Joseph Losey and many others, some never being able to come back, others making masterpieces in other countries, like France and England. The story here builds up towards the final interrogation by the committee in the end, which reaches nothing but a tumultuous quarrel of outrage and unacceptable bullying by those responsible, who are called heroes of America, one of them being Nixon, all of them being politicians. The whole spectrum of victims are exposed, like Larry Nolan, played by Chris Cooper who is forced to act against his conscience with the ruin of his family as a consequence, his wife Dorothy, a film star, being admirably played by Patricia Wettig, the perhaps most important role in the drama, illustrating the full inhumanity, Sam Wanamaker plays the lawyer who tries to find a way out without succeeding, Ben Piazza as Darryl F. Zanuck skillfully circumnavigating the dirty business of politics but without being able to evade shipwrecks, and Martin Scorsese as the director who voluntarily chooses exile to continue filming in England, possibly a portrait of Jules Dassin. The drama is deeply upsetting, this is no comedy but the most unnecessary of all tragedies in Hollywood and the one that definitely wrecked the good name of the whole film business, which up to 1950 had been flamboyantly glorious. How sad. And how important for films like this one to be made, to tell the truth after all.

Guilty by Suspicion is a film that was based on the Hollywood blacklist and associated activities stemming from McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee. It stars Robert De Niro and Annette Bening together with George Wendt,Sam Wanamaker and Martin Scorsese. In the story,David Merrill is a film director of the 1950's who is facing the end of his career after he was being accused of being a communist at a time when Hollywood intends to blacklist them.He then suffers a crisis in morality if he only implicates colleagues as Communist agents during this rise of McCarthyism and the Red Scare.He must decide whether to turn informant, or to stick to principle at the cost of his life's work.This film was written and directed by Irwin Winkler.Robert De Niro definitely does a great in his acting performance as Merrill.Also,the film provides a realistic depiction of McCarthyism and the Red Scare that occurred during the 50's in Hollywood.Also,it provides us a great lesson to become true to ourselves and to our conscience as it could become the best service that we can provide anywhere particularly for our country.It is one film that will definitely teach us this lesson.No doubt about it.

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.