Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

ThedevilChoose When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Jenna Walter The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

B24 The comments on this film to date are some of the most intelligent and knowledgeable I have yet to read anywhere on the imdb site. Even those who have little use for the ideologies of the original Hollywood Ten writers and directors present some views about the film itself that make sense. It is almost as if this drama within a movie production about another movie has taken on a life of its own.I am particularly struck by the comments of people who actually knew either the real characters or the actors who portray them in this production. How often does one get to read that kind of material? Truly impressive.The film itself is without much life, unfortunately. It looks about as much like the real Silver City as some place in South Africa, with extras frequently standing around ogling the camera while Goldblum et al. speechify. I knew it was made in Spain, but why? Even the Greyhound bus sign is completely bogus for its time. And there are very few real Mexican-Americans who look or act like Spaniards, even the criollo descendants of New Mexico colonists from the seventeenth century. My own grandfather was a member of the union who worked the big copper pits near Silver City. He would have laughed his head off at this lame depiction of the ongoing troubles between labor and management that were far more complex and life-threatening than anything portrayed here. (And continue to a lesser scale in the mines around here even today.)The real Gale Sondergaard I will always remember as the quintessential German spy who scared the life out of me back in the early 40's.

jlm-6 Why, sorry? Because I played a part in this (call it a) movie and cannot be proud that I did.This was my second piece in a movie. Not a word to speak, but a name part, all the same. At first, I was thrilled... For, yes, it really was a privilege, having Jeff Goldblum's fine FINE work to watch and learn from, over the three days that I was on set. And, yes, I thoroughly enjoyed meeting and working with names I had long known, such as Shane Rimmer (Out of Africa, The Spy Who Loved Me) Greta Scacchi (Presumed Innocent, Le Violon Rouge) and Peter Bowles (To The Manor Born, The Irish R.M.). And, I'll, certainly, never forget comedian John Sessions' hilarious impersonations - between takes - of Robert de Niro, Anthony Hopkins, Joe Pesci and Roger Moore.However, I am forever embarrassed and disgusted with myself at not having trusted my own judgement and at having, instead, allowed "director" Carl Francis to "not direct" me. I would have used "misdirect", only all I saw him do (over three days) was pout and moan, but never once direct nor even misdirect the actors. I should have known not to trust him when, having been auditioned by Mr Francis, in person, I was called in to play some guy called Ring Lardner, though not told till the day before and - because I had no lines to speak - was ignored and given no background material on the character. The character, I found out, later, just happened to be one of lead character Herbert Biberman's closest friends!! Instead, I was just told to "stand there" or "sit there", with only my common sense and inexperience to rely on (I had only had a played another minor film role, prior to this).My part may have been insignificant compared to, say, Jeff Goldblum's Biberman or, indeed, compared to anyone else's. But when a director and his team decide to overlook the supposed "minor" details, you can be sure they do so because they're having trouble coping with the "bigger" stuff. And, if you ever waste a second of your life watching "One of the Hollywood Ten" you'll see what I mean!This film is a free-for-all; a riot, in the saddest sense of the word. If you had the vast self-assuredness and professional aplomb of someone like Mr Goldblum or Ms Scacchi, you were sure to do a good job (no-one to stop you!) even if your effort was later completely wasted or misplaced within the haphazard confines of Mr Francis' movie. If, on the other hand, you were a beginner, then, you were finished before you'd even had a chance to start. A cast brimming with professionals might just have made it happen, regardless of the movie's directing. Sadly, however, this was not the case, for many of the "minor" parts in the cast (and there were many slightly-above-extra roles in this film) had been filled with inexperienced English-speaking film actors, such as myself, most of us living here, in cheap-labour Spain, which is where most of the film was shot.As with any society, a film is a universe, where everything - from its subatomic particles, through to its larger atoms and, even, the greater moons and planets - needs to feel it has its place; an orbiting code. Without codes, chaos and voids appear.This film is a chaos and a void. Avoid this film!

paulet The movie tries to tell two stories, related but distinct: the story of the Hollywood ten and the blacklist, and the story of how Herbert Biberman came to make "Salt of the Earth" after serving his sentence for contempt of Congress. It does a fair job of telling the second story--but only fair; it does a terrible, dumbed-down job at the first. And the same defects mar both of them.Start with a trivial, nitpicky error: the name of the striking union in "Salt." It was in fact the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. The movie calls it International Minemill Union or something of the kind. Why does this detail matter?It matters because Mine Mill (as it was known) was a real union, with a real history. Its roots were in the early 20th century Western Federation of Miners, a union once close to the IWW, which waged bitter struggles against the copper bosses and was ultimately destroyed. Mine Mill itself was founded as a CIO union which by 1952--when "Salt" was filmed--had been expelled from the CIO, along with the West Coast longshoremen and others, essentially for refusing to purge the Communists and endorse Cold War foreign policy.In other words the union had a context, which included the Communist Party, which was (after all) what Biberman et al. were being punished for refusing to abjure. It wasn't fortuitous that he and the blacklisted writer and producer Michael Wilson and Paul Jarrico decided to film a Mine Mill strike story. It was part of the resistance of the Communist-influenced Left to being forced out of the labor movement and out of popular consciousness,marginalized and demonized and rendered utterly ineffectual. But in the movie the union and the strike seem to have sprung from nowhere, the union members and leaders are brave innocents who don't know about movies and the Cold War, and they're rescued from an FBI-led vigilante mob by--the New Mexico State troopers! (I knew something was terribly wrong when some people in the audience actually cheered the cops' arrival.)And the Ten have no context either. All the political and legal strategic decisions seem to be made by an informal gathering at a writers' hangout where Dalton Trumbo--sorry, "Dalton Trumbo"--and Biberman make ponderous little speeches about Jefferson and the fascist danger. I don't doubt that those guys were capable of pomposity--I don't object that they're portrayed unflatteringly. But they were, in fact, CPUSA members, mostly of long standing, and that's not how decisions were made. Nor were decisions made in the vocabulary of civil libertarianism. This vocabulary *was* deployed in public statements, but part of the problem (which, by 1949, at least three of the Ten--Lardner, Maltz, and Trumbo--were keenly aware of) was the disconnect between this Jeffersonian rhetoric and the actual ideas of Marxism-Leninism (not to mention the actual conditions obtaining in Stalin's USSR.) Near the end, a vigilante accuses Biberman of echoing Marx; no, comes the answer, it's Jefferson. In the popular Front years the CPUSA had put forward the slogan "Communism is 20th Century Americanism." By 1952 the Popular Front was a distant memory, yet this movie "Biberman" seems to have out-Browdered Browder and dropped the Communism part altogether.So the movie gives us, not the Ten, but the version of the Ten that the Party hoped would rally timid liberals to their aid. It was a fairly hollow construct 55 years ago; are today's audiences really so thick-headed that they won't see through it? With cardboard heroes, a cardboard villain: Edward Dmytryk, who "named names" *after* serving his time, is presented as justifying his decision purely so he can go back to making movies. Now this may have been his real motive--certainly Lester Cole and Paul Jarrico, among others, believed it was. But it *wasn't* the motive he presented. He claimed that he had become disillusioned with Communism and couldn't see the point of sacrificing his career to a cause he had come to oppose. A rationale?--maybe. That's something people do, and audiences get to evaluate their sincerity or insincerity. But villains don't, as in the old Western formula, get off the stagecoach and immediately kick a puppy. A friend of mine defended the movie on the ground that people know nothing about the Ten, so anything is better than utter ignorance. Leaving aside the question whether this cartoon history isn't, in fact, the same thing as utter ignorance, what people are we talking about? This movie is not going to find a big audience. Most of the people who saw it in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival were, um, well stricken in years and politically knowledgeable (if not necessarily very bright, cf. their reaction to the State Trooper sequence mentioned above.) And dammit, it's unforgivably patronizing to take the attitude that "Of course we know better, but this pabulum is good enough for--" someone else. Context, context, context. The prison mess hall is shown as racially integrated--in 1949! In truth Lardner and Cole successfully challenged the segregated chow line in the prison at Danbury but this was a quirky exception. But this anachronism, like the error about the union's name, gives the game away: this is a movie about history that doesn't respect history, or the audience's ability to comprehend it. Is that because the filmmakers were too busy congratulating themselves on their nobility for making the movie at all? Are they cynical, dumb, both? I don't think it matters much. I'm glad my friend Lester Cole wasn't depicted, because that would have caused me real pain.

Ephraim Gadsby One of the most overblown times in American history is when the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities was in full swing. The left has been using it to raise paranoia (and thus votes for them) for fifty years. The fact that a fellow who got leadership was a fruitcake himself and made mockery of a serious affair by his crass stupidity hasn't helped matters.In fact, there was extensive Soviet espionage and undermining of the American system of freedom in the 1950s. Icons of the left like Harry Hopkins, the Rosenbergs, and Alger Hiss, are now proven by Soviet records to have been agents, to their own degree, to Communist/Socialist masters.Hollywood was rife with Communists who were perfect stooges for Stalin and his crew. Many of the same people who were in the forefront of condemning Hitler turned a blind eye to Soviet Gulags.Although McCarthy had nothing to do with Hollywood, the "blacklisting" that went on to keep Communists who might be subversive from attempting propaganda on the screen is the part of the anti-Communist crusade that has received the most attention. Hollywood blacklisting and prejudice are usually behind the scenes, but that this was carried on openly was injurious to the American values it sought to protect. The "Hollywood Ten" were a group of "unfriendly witnesses", who are usually made out to be talent suppressed at this period (Billy Wilder, I think, had the famous line to the effect that, only a couple of them had any real talent, the others were just unfriendly.While a good movie can be made out of this material, this isn't it. The game cast -- including Jeff Goldblum, John Sessions, and Greta Scacchi -- try to breathe life into it, but perhaps the paranoia raised by the whole mess is finally running out of steam of its own accord.