Guilty by Suspicion *** (1991, Robert De Niro, Annette Bening, Patricia Wettig, George Wendt, Sam Wanamaker, Barry Primus) – Classic Movie Review 3373

Writer-director Irwin Winkler’s 1991 drama is an interesting and sincere but mild drama of the Hollywood blacklist intrigues. It is an intelligently written reminder of some uncomfortable facts of Hollywood’s – and America’s – past, but it kind of blows it by taking them nowhere in particular. The film wears its seriousness of purpose and goodness of heart on its sleeve, but it has no real guts or iron in its soul, and it ends up as a woolly liberal movie, though of course that’s not so terrible.

Robert De Niro holds the screen securely as David Merrill, a fictitious 1950s Hollywood director and McCarthy blacklist victim, but Annette Bening (as his ex-wife Ruth), Patricia Wettig (as an actress called Dorothy Nolan), George Wendt (as Bunny Baxter) and Sam Wanamaker (as Felix Graff) are wasted in underwritten roles.

Merrill returns from filming in France to find he is under investigation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and can’t work till he is cleared of having communist sympathies.

Nevertheless, with its wealth of period detail, atmospheric cinematography by Michael Ballhaus and tense screenplay, it is classy entertainment, especially for film buffs.

It is producer Winkler’s directorial début.

The Front (1976) and Fellow Traveller (1989) are still tops in this Hollywood blacklist movie department, though now we also have The Majestic (2001) and Trumbo (2015), both highly impressive too.

De Niro and Winkler followed it up with Night and the City (1992), which also finds a role for Barry Primus.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3373

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