Director David Merrill (Robert De Niro) returns from filming in France to find the country over-run by the Red Scare. People are all taking loyalty oaths. The House Committee on Un-American Activities is hunting for Communists. Bunny Baxter (George Wendt) is his writer best friend. Actress friend Dorothy Nolan (Patricia Wettig) is struggling after her husband named names. David's married to Ruth (Annette Bening) with a young son. Friendships and marriages are breaking apart as tension rises. With his work on the line, Merrill is also pushed to name names as others acquiesce.

It's a sincere telling of a fictional Red Scare story with some of the real players in the real history of the Un-American Activities Committee. It's very sincere but not the most thrilling drama. The actors are first rate. Despite the good work, there are no surprises and nothing too dramatic. It feels more or less melodramatic. This is one movie where a based on true story would be useful.

It's almost impossible to write any kind of objective film about the blacklist, the wounds of it run deep in show business. Guilty By Suspicion has no pretense to objectivity, neither does that John Wayne epic Big Jim McLain which was favorable to the House Un American Activities Committee.

Those who gave testimony at HUAC did so for a variety of motives. Some like Adolphe Menjou wanted the blacklist for everyone to the left of Herbert Hoover. Some like Robert Taylor felt they were doing a patriotic service. Some under the threat of not being able to work as artists in their chosen profession named names before HUAC. A very select few said stick it in your ear.

If there any guilty parties it's not the artists whatever their political persuasion. It was the studio bosses and one of them, Darryl F. Zanuck is played here by Ben Piazza, who gave in without exception to HUAC and cooperated in the blacklist, who pitted the people of various political persuasions against each other. Sad to say that's not really demonstrated here in Guilty By Suspicion.

The members of HUAC were 95% on the political right of both parties. The Democrats were mostly southerners and the Republicans were on the right in their party. The liberals of either party had more constructive ways to spend their time in Congess.

Guilty By Suspicion tells the story of Robert DeNiro as a fictional film director who gets blacklisted because of secret hearing testimony given by Chris Cooper. His struggle to find work turns positively Kafkaesque until he agrees to go before the committee.

DeNiro strikes all the right notes in his performance and is aided and abetted by the performance of Annette Bening as his estranged wife. Acting honors however go to Patricia Wettig who plays a distraught blacklisted actress with a drinking problem to start with.

Guilty By Suspicion is not the ultimate telling of the blacklist's story, but it's still pretty good and does get a feel for the times the story is set in.

Irwin Winkler's "Guilty by Suspicion" looks at the Hollywood blacklist, with Robert DeNiro as a director targeted by HUAC. It's well known that the Hollywood bigwigs were only too happy to collaborate with HUAC. One of the most effective scenes is when they're watching TV and see a report on the Rosenbergs, and how HUAC thinks that any pain felt by the Rosenbergs' sons is a small price to pay for national security (sounds like something that al-Qaeda or ISIS would say, doesn't it?). As for the scene where someone writes down the license plate, I understand that they did that in real life.

This is one part of history that particularly needs to get remembered. When some right-wing ideologue calls for rooting out "the other" in the name of Americanism, it simply means that he wants to stay in power at all costs. It's worth noting that Franklin Roosevelt was negotiating with the Soviet Union to make sure that there would be no more wars once WWII was over, but he died and so Truman canceled those plans. Despite having negotiated the division of Europe with the USSR, Truman went along with the claims by McCarthy and Co. that the leftists helped the USSR take over Eastern Europe.

Definitely a movie that I recommend. This topic took on a new relevance in the so called War on Terrorism.