Film review: The last Vermeer
There is a part of Dalton Trumbo's acceptance speech (when he was awarded the Laurel Award by the Writer's Guild of America) that I thought about after I watched this film. Mr Trumbo, like others in America, was for a time blacklisted by the House on un-American activities committee and by the major producers of the period who went along with the government, the committee's agenda. "The blacklist was a time of evil and that no one on either side, who survived it, came through untouched by evil. Caught in a situation that had passed beyond the control of mere individuals, each person reacted as his nature, his needs, his convictions and his particular circumstances compelled him to. There was bad faith and good. Honesty and dishonesty. Courage and cowardice. Selflessness and opportunism. Wisdom and stupidity. Good and bad on both sides. And almost every individual involved, no matter where he stood, combined some or all of these antithetical qualities, in his own pers