Guilty by Suspicion (1991)

The Worst Film Ever

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Don't listen to the negative reviews

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

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.

A painfully tedious exposition of a modern day Salem witch hunt. An in-depth (inquisition) tale of American political paranoia that has little or no consequence outside of the USA.A well made movie but I wasn't interested enough to finish watching it.Regardless of good performances and an interesting story to some, I could not get into this movie at all.Irrelevant to all not obsessed with 'subversive' communist attacks against the 'superior' western ways that clearly have no problems at all. American idiosyncratic ideals at their best (worst).The ideas behind communism are actually quite good, just didn't work very well in practice. Have a good look at capitalism, same thing there. People are the problem not the politics. Unless you are still paranoid of communism, avoid this movie.

****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.

Robert DeNiro will not give names to the House UnAmerican Activities committee. There goes his Hollywood career. His marriage to Ruth, Annette Bening, has already ended in divorce, so why not the rest of his life down the drain as well?The film is very similar in nature to Woody Allen's "The Front" of the 1970s. If you've seen the latter, you know what the ending shall be. It's called principles above all.Patricia Wettig gives a fine supporting performance as an actress turned in by her own husband with tragedy resulting.Nice to see Martin Scorsese go in front of the cameras for this film. He is fleeing to England to escape testifying.We get a wonderful sense of the 1950s in Hollywood. Marilyn Monroe is hot and so is this film.