You have to realize each and every human being has goodness and evil within them. Some people like Hitler, Stalin and Pot Pol had very little goodness and lots of evil in them.
Personally, I believe the Clintons and most Democrats are inching way too close to Adolf and Uncle Joe's side of the scale, but on Dalton Trumbo, I'd give him a pass.
Even being a failed screenwriter (i.e. unsold - My head is bloodied but unbowed in butting it against the high, strong Hollywood wall against Good Republican screenwriters) of the late 1960s through the late 1990s, I can still recognize good from bad.
A screenplay, to those not in the know, is like blueprints to a builder for a filmmaker. Granted a bad director or producer or both can take a good screenplay and make a horrible film out of it, but very, very rarely, can anyone take a bad screenplay and make a decent film out of it.
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Spartacus, and Exodus are excellent screenplays that became excellent films. I can still watch them today and see how well they were put together. They have a beginning, a middle and an end with wonderful characters that the audience cares about.
The highest compliment I could give them is I wished I had written them!
Well, my version of Screen-writing 101 aside, I do not lose any sleep over Dalton Trumbo's past as a Communist screenwriter. He never cause anyone to die needlessly in Mogadishu, never had sex with a White House intern and lied about it to the nation and a grand jury, neither did Trumbo ever lie about the Rose Law Firm's billing records, the White House Travel Office firings nor Vince Foster death to name but just a few of many, many other sins.
In the context of Ken Burns TV Documentary "The War," Thumbo's Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo will forever be one of the best films made during the Second World War. I have not seen Burns work, but I am taping it for a later viewing.
Perhaps I will have bone to pick then...
BTW At Dalton Trumbo's IMDb Page one can look at the many, many IMHO excellent films he wrote including A Guy Named Joe, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, Roman Holiday, The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, Cowboy, Lonely Are the Brave and Hawaii.
“I do not lose any sleep over Dalton Trumbo’s past as a Communist screenwriter.”
I don’t lose any sleep over him as a screenwriter. He beats the pants
off 99% of the dreadful drivel from Hollywood.
But I did think he was an Exhibit A about the Communists in America that
sometimes showed their real allegiance was to Communism/USSR.
And I say this with understanding that when The Great Depression was
going strong, flirting with Communism as an alternative to capitalism
wasn’t such a wild idea.
The first time I heard about Trumbo “Naming names” to the FBI...
that was just too rich to not be noted in the historical records.
I guess he hoped the “useful idiots” at the FBI would put the smack-down
on all the people he named...even if most were probably just pacifists...
not Fascist agents.
This would be the same guy that would curse other people that
“named names” either due to patriotism to the USA or court order.
And to have Trumbo’s memorial fountain at the U. of Colorado in
the People’s Republic of Boulder and (until recently?) the home of Ward Churchill...
“they couldn’t make this stuff up in Hollywood”.